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Vol 24

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Winter 2016

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Lumpen 127 Volume 24 Issue 03 Winter 2016

105.5 FM Chicago

Introduction

History Can Inspire New Activists by Amanda Scotese

10 The Illusion of Freedom by Chris Hedges

13 The Big Lie: Hillary The Pragmatist vs. Bernie The Dreamer by Rob Hager

Issue Issues

127 The Issues

Contributors Chris Hedges Rob Hager Lila Nordstrom Jerry Boyle Joe Collier Amanda Scotese Kyle Gaffin Dan Sloan Charlie Festa Leah Menzer Ben Marcus Grant Reynolds Jessica Campbell Johnny Sampson Kevin Budnik Max Morris Nate Beaty Sarah Leitten Two Tone Comix

'16

There is only One Issue Worth Voting on in 2016 by Lila Nordstrom

16 Chicago at the Crossroads by Jerry Boyle

18 Your Local Library — Use It or Lose It! by Joe Collier

19 Chicago Survivors and Chicago’s Citizens for Change: An Interview with Joy Mc Cormack by Kyle Gaffin

24 Check That Gun: An Interview with John Gruber by Kyle Gaffin

26 A World Without Prisons: An Interview with Mariame Kaba by Dan Sloan

32 Preventing Gun Violence: An Interview with Mark Walsh by Kyle Gaffin

41 10 Non-Profits You Should Know About (but probably don't...yet)

42 Chicago Activism Network

43 Lumpen Radio Section by WLPN, Logan Bay, and Leah Menzer

50 Comics by Ben Marcus, Grant Reynolds, Johnny Sampson, Kevin Budnik, Max Morris, Jessica Campbell, Nate Beaty, Sarah Leitten, Two Tone Comix

USpeak and Freedom of Speech on Campus: A Conversation with Lillian Osborne by Dan Sloan

38 Boosting Literacy: An Interview with Noah Cruickshank by Kyle Gaffin

side

Well, Lumpens, we're well on our way through winter and we thought it would be fitting to reflect on where Chicago is and what we want to see happen in this coming year.

as dysfunctional as ever and literacy rates are some of the most atrocious in the nation. We’re tempted to say that things are looking grim for 2016.

But maybe we can fix a There's no denying that few things. It's pretty it's rough out there, easy to go around talking friends. Cops are about how everything's shooting teens while the going straight to hell. Mayor's office tries to But what is to be done? What are we acbury the evidence. The billionaire tually going to do about Governor has kept our the problems our city is state locked in a months- facing? In this long budget standoff issue we’ve highlighted that has left dwindling some people and organizations that are engaged funds for education, social services, and other in activism and non-profit work to try to make this programs that the marginalized in our city decity a better place to live. pend on most. With them in the mix, The year is we can see some bright young, but we've alstars on the horizon. ready seen an obscenely And we hope that as you high number of shootread through this, you’ll ings occur with few be encouraged to take signs of slowing down. action. Chicago also ranks among the top ten Ameri- This year is a big one, as can cities in terms of we have an election coming up that could well income inequality, with incomes for those at the prove to be historically significant. This issue of very top rising, while Lumpen is about, well… remaining largely static issues, and this election for those at the bottom – and Rauner and cycle has brought to the his hedge-fund buddies fore what we think are seem intent on keeping some of the most important for the future of it that way. The our society. We’re talkeducational system is 8

ing, of course, about the central concerns of the Sanders campaign, of economic inequality and money in politics. In the wake of Citizens United, vast amounts of corporate money have poured into our political system, a fact that has consequently made our elected officials more and more beholden to the interests of the wealthy few and less and less accountable to the majority of the people they ought to represent. If nothing is done to change the status quo in this regard, we will continue to move towards a plutocracy and further away from a democracy in any meaningful sense of the term. We believe that a vote for anyone else is a vote to maintain this status quo. As some of you may already know, we’re currently building a lowpower FM radio station called Lumpen Radio. Not only will it be a platform for some of the freshest musical and audio arts programming, it will also be a forum for new ideas, independent voices, and radical commentary on current events and

issues. In a way, it’s our next foray into information activism, a means to bring exposure to countercultural movements and progressive solutions. We hope you’ll tune in. Let’s do some good. Let's make some change.

2 0 1 6

THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM THE ILLUSION OF FREEDOM 10

By Chris Hedges

The seizure of political and economic power by corporations is unassailable. Who funds and manages our elections? Who writes our legislation and laws? Who determines our defense policies and vast military expenditures? Who is in charge of the Department of the Interior? The Department of Homeland Security? Our intelligence agencies? The Department of Agriculture? The Food and Drug Administration? The Department of Labor? The Federal Reserve? The mass media? Our systems of entertainment? Our prisons and schools? Who determines our trade and environmental policies? Who imposes austerity on the public while enabling the looting of the U.S. Treasury and the tax boycott by Wall Street? Who criminalizes dissent? A disenfranchised white working class vents its lust for fascism at Trump campaign rallies. Naive liberals, who think they can mount effective resistance within the embrace of the Democratic Party, rally around the presidential candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who knows that the military-industrial complex is sacrosanct. Both the working class and the liberals will be sold out. Our rights and opinions do not matter. We have surrendered to our own form of wehrwirtschaft. We do not count within the political process. This truth, emotionally difficult to accept, violates our conception of ourselves as a free, democratic people. It shatters our vision of ourselves as a nation embodying superior virtues and endowed with the responsibility to serve as a beacon of light to the world. It takes from us the “right” to impose our fictitious virtues on others by violence. It forces us into a new political radicalism. This truth reveals, incontrovertibly, that if real change is to be achieved, if our voices are to be heard, corporate systems of power have to be destroyed. This realization engenders an existential and political crisis. The inability to confront this crisis, to accept this truth, leaves us appealing to centers of power that will never respond and ensures we are crippled by self-delusion. The longer fantasy is substituted for reality, the faster we sleepwalk toward oblivion. There is no guarantee we will wake up. Magical thinking has gripped societies in the past. Those civilizations believed that fate, history, superior virtues or a divine force guaranteed their eternal triumph. As they collapsed, they constructed repressive dystopias. They imposed censorship and forced the unreal to be accepted as real. Those who did not conform were disappeared linguistically and then literally.

Reprinted from Truthdig .com

The vast disconnect between the official narrative of reality and reality itself creates an Alice-in-Wonderland experience. Propaganda is so pervasive, and truth is so rarely heard, that people do not trust their own senses. We are currently being assaulted by political campaigning that resembles the constant crusading by fascists and communists in past totalitarian societies. This campaigning, devoid of substance and subservient to the mirage of a free society, is anti-politics. No vote we cast will alter the configurations of the corporate state. The wars will go on. Our national resources will continue to be diverted to militarism. The corporate fleecing of the country will get worse. Poor people of color will still be gunned down by militarized police in our streets. The eradication of our civil liberties will accelerate. The economic misery inflicted on over half the population will expand. Our environment will be ruthlessly exploited by fossil fuel and animal agriculture corporations and we will careen toward ecological collapse. We are “free” only as long as we play our assigned parts. Once we call out power for what it is, once we assert our rights and resist, the chimera of freedom will vanish. The iron fist of the most sophisticated security and surveillance apparatus in human history will assert itself with a terrifying fury. The powerful web of interlocking corporate entities is beyond our control. Our priorities are not corporate priorities. The corporate state, whose sole aim is exploitation and imperial expansion for increased profit, sinks money into research and development of weapons and state surveillance systems while it starves technologies that address global warming and renewable energy. Universities are awash in

defense money but cannot find funds for environmental studies. Our bridges, roads and levees are crumbling from neglect. Our schools are overcrowded, decaying and being transformed into for-profit vocational centers. Our elderly and poor are abandoned and impoverished. Young men and women are crippled by unemployment or underemployment and debt peonage. Our for-profit health care drives the sick into bankruptcy. Our wages are being suppressed and the power of government to regulate corporations is dramatically diminished by a triad of new trade agreements—the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement. Government utilities and services, with the implementation of the Trade in Services Agreement, will see whole departments and services, from education to the Postal Service, dismantled and privatized. Our manufacturing jobs, sent overseas, are not coming back. And a corporate media ignores the decay to perpetuate the fiction of a functioning democracy, a reviving economy and a glorious empire. The essential component of totalitarian propaganda is artifice. The ruling elites, like celebrities, use propaganda to create false personae and a false sense of intimacy with the public. The emotional power of this narrative is paramount. Issues do not matter. Competency and honesty do not matter. Past political stances or positions do not matter. What is important is how we are made to feel. Those who are skilled at deception succeed. Those who have not mastered the art of deception become “unreal.” Politics in totalitarian societies are entertainment. Reality, because it is complicated, messy and confusing, is banished from the world of mass entertainment. Clichés, stereotypes and uplifting messages that are comforting and self-congratulatory, along with elaborate spectacles, replace fact-based discourse.

The more communities break down and poverty expands, the more anxious and frightened people will retreat into selfdelusion. Those who speak the truth— whether about climate change or our system of inverted totalitarianism— will be branded as seditious and unpatriotic. They will be hated for destroying the illusion. This, as Gabler noted, is the danger of a society dominated by entertainment. Such a society, he wrote, “… took dead aim at the intellectuals’ most cherished values. That theme was the triumph of the senses over the mind, of emotion over reason, of chaos over order, or the id over the superego. … Entertainment was Plato’s worst nightmare. It deposed the rational and enthroned the sensational and in so doing deposed the intellectual minority and enthroned the unrefined majority.”

Many people, maybe even most people, will not wake up. Those rebels who rise up to try to wrest back power from despotic forces will endure not only the violence of the state, but the hatred and vigilante violence meted out by the self-deluded victims of exploitation. The systems of propaganda will relentlessly demonize those who resist, along with Muslims, undocumented workers, environmentalists, AfricanAmericans, homosexuals, feminists, intellectuals and artists. The utopia will arrive, the state systems of propaganda will assure its followers, once those who obstruct or poison it are removed. Donald Trump is following this script. The German psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm in his book “Escape From Freedom” explained the yearning of those who are rendered insignificant to “surrender their freedom.” Totalitarian systems, he pointed out, function like messianic religious cults. “The frightened individual,” Fromm wrote, “seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.” This is the world we live in. The totalitarian systems of the past used different symbols, different iconography and different fears. They rose up out of a different historical context. But they too demonized the weak and persecuted the strong. They too promised the dispossessed that by subsuming their selves into that of demagogues,

or parties or other organizations that promised unrivaled power, they would become powerful. It never works. The growing frustration, the ongoing powerlessness, the mounting repression, leads these betrayed individuals to lash out violently, first at the weak and the demonized, and then at those among them who lack sufficient ideological purity. There is, in the end, an orgy of self-immolation. The death instinct, as Sigmund Freud understood, has a seductive allure. History may not repeat itself. But it echoes itself. Human nature, after all, is constant. We will react no differently from those who went before us. This should not dissuade us from resisting, but the struggle will be long and difficult. Before it is over there will be blood in the streets.

THIS IS THE DANGER OF A SOCIETY DOMINATED BY ENTERTAINMENT.

“Entertainment was an expression of democracy, throwing off the chains of alleged cultural repression,” Neal Gabler wrote in “Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.” “So too was consumption, throwing off the chains of the old production-oriented culture and allowing anyone to buy his way into his fantasy. And, in the end, both entertainment and consumption often provided the same intoxication: the sheer, endless pleasure of emancipation from reason, from responsibility, from tradition, from class and from all the other bonds that restrained the self.”

Despair, powerlessness and hopelessness diminish the emotional and intellectual resilience needed to confront reality. Those cast aside cling to the entertaining forms of self-delusion offered by the ruling elites. This segment of the population is easily mobilized to “purge” the nation of dissenters and human “contaminants.” Totalitarian systems, including our own, never lack for willing executioners.

The Big Lie: Hillary The Pragmatist vs Bernie The Dreamer

The Sanders revolution is not going to be televised and it is not going to be reported in the rest of the mass media either. The revolution is against plutocracy and the plutocracy owns the mass media. Anyone still getting their information from the mass media is missing out on the history being made in an historical political year that rivals any of the past two generations.

By Rob Hager

Yet patriots should still be prepared to answer plutocratic propaganda that issues from the mass media to pollute the information environment. A month ago its propaganda was that Bernie Sanders was losing, when upon closer analysis of the facts he was clearly winning. This month’s propaganda is that Hillary Clinton is experienced and pragmatic whereas Bernie Sanders is an inexperienced dreamer who will sacrifice the achievable prosaic reform by reaching for impossibly poetic ideals. It must be said very clearly that this is a complete and total lie, deploying “the big lie” technique of propagandists. It must be called out as such. The most consistent message from Sanders is what he said when he first started exploring a presidential bid and has continued to say down to the last debate when he clearly defined the central issue of the 2016 campaign: “Very little is going to be done to transform our economy and to create the kind of middle class we need unless we end a corrupt campaign finance system which is undermining American democracy.”

If Sanders does not overcome the plutocracy and restore American democracy he is quite clear that “very little” is going to get done by him as president. That is not the talk of an unrealistic dreamer, but of a very honest, clear-eyed, practical politician who knows exactly what the score is. The difference between Sanders and Clinton is that Clinton assumes that under her presidency, as it has been under Obama‘s, the plutocracy will be in good hands. Therefore she promises that “very little” will get done by way of “pragmatic” reform based on “common ground” with Republicans. This is code for those reforms that the plutocracy authorizes at the point where the much vaunted partisan polarization suddenly gives way to bipartisan service to plutocracy.

Rob Hager is a public interest litigator who filed an amicus brief in the Montana sequel to Citizens United and has worked as an international consultant on anti-corruption policy and legislation.

Reprinted from Counterpunch .org

The Democratic primary election presents a very easy choice that has nothing to do with pragmatism, dreaming, or more or less experience running the corrupt American system of politics. These are products of propagandists designed to change the subject. The real choice is between someone who is planning on the restoration of democracy and someone who is planning for the perpetuation of plutocracy.

Lila Nordstrom is Writer, Director of StuyHealth, Host of the Brain Trust Live Podcast

where Lila co-hosts the Brain Trust Live podcast and blogs regularly about politics

It takes systemic reform to overcome systemic corruption

TH ER E

huffingtonpost.com/ lila-nordstrom/ there-is-only-oneissue-w_b_9141542. html

By Lila Nordstrom

and braintrustlive .com

ONLY ONE ISSUE WORTH

When applied specifically for reform of the systemically corrupt system which is American politics, the incremental kind of reform that Clinton proposes is actually counterproductive. It makes the system even more corrupt. It takes systemic reform to overcome systemic corruption. Since systemic reform must start from the top, the precise approach to reform of political corruption by the presidential candidates, whether counterproductively incremental or effectively systemic, is key to the future of American democracy. We have had 40 years of diversionary and piecemeal reform proposals as the systemic corruption only grew worse. Though plutocracy is by far the most important issue, Sanders is not running a one issue campaign. While totally leveling with the people about the limited possibilities for the policy reforms he advocates if the current systemic corruption is not outlawed, he is also informing people about the reforms that he will pursue if democracy is restored.

Sanders is very appropriately campaigning on these other policy issues because they could all be done relatively easily, indeed would already have been done, if the United States were a democracy. A democracy is where majorities get the policies they want that are not inconsistent with democracy itself. Policies like singlepayer health care, free state college tuition, and virtually all other of Sanders’ “middle class” economic reforms have majority backing. In a democracy it is not an impractical dream to think that the majority would be able to enact the policies that they want. Only in a plutocracy is policy that serves the majority a mere impractical dream. By framing his campaign around a platform of majoritarian policy reforms, Sanders is presenting a far clearer picture of what the country would look like under his presidency if he succeeds in his priority task of overthrowing the plutocracy. This provides a richer and truer explanation of the importance of this single decisive issue than if he had run a single issue campaign, as professor Larry Lessig advised. The choice is then quite clear. Hillary Clinton and her mass media backers criticizing Sanders as an impractical idealist are clearly assuming that the plutocracy will continue on her watch, as it certainly would. In her plutocracy, as in Obama’s plutocracy, none of Sanders’ policies would be anything but an unattainable ideal, as he himself has consistently indicated. Sanders is focused on, and promises to achieve with the continued support of the people, the overthrow of “the billionaire class” plutocracy. Then adopting what are, in Clinton’s world, “impractical” reforms would actually become a matter of ordinary democratic politics.

Here's a bold declaration: Despite the rancor accompanying this year's races and last year's congressional session, there is only one issue worth voting on. It's a deceptively simple issue too; massively important, but, oddly, still one a vast majority of Americans agree on. The issue? Campaign finance reform, and in this year of big ideas and big issues and movements and Twitter trolling, many of us will get a chance to meaningfully vote on it for the first time in our lives. For millennials and beyond, Bernie Sanders offers a first opportunity to cast a ballot in favor of a major primary player who hasn't bought into the corporate funding system. Even if you think he's a grump of an elderly socialist with nothing else to offer, it's worth taking that option seriously because, whether you know it or not, your vote on campaign finance reform is ultimately the only one that counts. We live with some hugely unpopular realities in the U.S., but chances are you don't waste much thought on why, for example, Congress can't pass even minor pieces of gun control legislation despite our long history of grizzly mass shootings. You probably also don't spend time pondering why the best we can do in terms of health coverage is a national plan that puts millions of dollars of government money in the hands of for-profit private to insurance companies. You've likely never sat back and thought "Why can't we regulate Wall Street so that negligence and greed doesn't periodically put our entire economy at risk?" You're not lazy, you just already know the answer to all of these questions and the answer is corporate and lobbyist money in the pockets of your representatives, my representatives, strangers' representatives... all the representatives. This money is such a universal part of our electoral system that we don't even ask more of our candidates. Instead, voters are left to determine which candidates are supported by the least worst interests. When we have to think in terms of whether the banking lobby trumps the gun lobby or the health insurance lobby trumps the energy lobby, however, we've already lost. Every two years the Americans that bother to vote in the first place must cast their ballots in favor of policies they don't agree with and don't work in their favor in order to vote at all.

VOTING ON IN 2016

This is frustrating because of the mockery it makes of the democratic system, but it's especially frustrating since, back in June, the New York Times printed a poll showing near unanimous agreement on the need to change our electoral funding system. This isn't an exaggeration -- some people disagreed on the scope of the problem but 0% of them thought that everything was fine as-is. Americans don't reach those levels of unity on any other issue, including the question of comparatively small national importance such as whether snakes and tornadoes are scary. Unsurprisingly, of course, a majority of those polled by the Times were also pessimistic about anything being done. Candidates can say anything they want about healthcare, education, or "believing in what's best in us," but their ability to deliver on any promises at all is severely hampered by the fact that they can't be as responsive to voters as they are to the money that pays for their publicity. Our lack of campaign finance reform is, in fact, why we can't even get any action on the issue of campaign finance reform. As we close in on the bulk of the 2016 primaries, we've been asked by candidates on both sides of the aisle to think about what we believe our responsibilities are as voters. Some candidates within the establishment are asking us to vote pragmatically considering the system we have. Other candidates, those challengers like Sanders who are experiencing huge and largely unprecedented surges in the polls, are asking us to think beyond the system and vote towards the system we wish we had. It's understandable that many of us feel compelled to cut our losses and vote for the best version of the compromised system we know, but if we believe our job is to help decide on a pragmatic party strategy instead of representative party policies, then our opinions on the actual issues will never matter as much as those of the donor class and the flow of corporate money will never stop. If, however, we believe our responsibility is to vote for the policies that actually represent our values, then the fact that our current system prevents us from finding candidates that represent these values should be unacceptable. Every issue that Democratic voters hold dear is impossible to act on meaningfully without campaign finance reform, and every stalemate plaguing the American congress is derived from it. Opportunities to vote in favor of fixing the system are few and far between, but we have an opportunity here. Let's not waste it.

CHICAGO: AT THE Over the years, tourists from the coasts would disparage activism in Chicago, contrasting the lively scenes on the seaboards with the relatively placid affect of activism here. But the coastal cities don’t really represent America. Sure, New York is our heritage, and L.A. may be our future, but Chicago, the capital of flyover country, is here and now. If it’s not happening here, it’s not really happening -- the 60s, for instance, definitely happened here. And it’s happening here now, which bodes well for the country as a whole. Chicago is America’s crossroads, and when the national intersection gets busy it determines the traffic patterns for the entire country. Economic inequality, education, policing, race, – Chicago is setting the direction on each of these issues. And the process of setting that direction is being played out in a classic confrontation between grass roots activism and a neo-liberal politician, Rahm Emanuel, who has a national profile and, until recently, aspirations for national office. The rise of activism in Chicago, and the corresponding fall of Rahm Emanuel’s political standing, have set the stage for national efforts.

RACE

POLICING

Chicago is, and always has been, a segregated city. Historically, our segregation was de facto, in contrast to the de jure segregation in the South. Martin Luther King faced racist cops in Selma, but was ultimately able to march there. In contrast, King was unable to march in Chicago, because the police could not protect him from the white mobs which almost killed him. But now that dynamic has flipped. Whites have balkanized the tax base with tax increment financing, which prevents wealthy areas from subsidizing poor neighborhoods. The city government has disinvested from Black communities, withdrawing resources, clearing land, and pursuing a strategy of depopulation. And the police are now organized as a paramilitary force serving as an occupying army in Black and Latino communities. Mass incarceration, torture, and shoot-to-kill tactics have resulted in a net loss of Black residents. It is nothing short of genocide, as the activists of We Charge Genocide explained to the United Nations Committee Against Torture in November of 2014. BYP 100, Fearless Leading By The Youth (FLY), Black Lives Matters Chicago, Assata’s Daughters, Lifted Voices, and many others have struggled to highlight the racial dimension of policing and public budgeting in Chicago. Their activism came to a head with the release of the video of the police murder of Laquan McDonald in November of 2015. That video put Chicago firmly at the center of the map of the Black Lives Matters movement, resulted in the firing of Garry McCarthy, Chicago’s very own Bull Connor, and thoroughly discredited Rahm Emanuel in the national consciousness. It has also induced the Chicago Police Department to pull in its fangs. And when the meanest gang on the street retreats, a certain measure of disorder will follow until a new equilibrium is established.

Although Chicago’s overall crime rate has decreased dramatically in recent decades, violent crime in Black and Latino neighborhoods was sufficiently spectacular to warrant a Spike Lee send-up of crime in Chicago based on the sexual boycott of Lysistrata. Just as Chicago was shaking off the stigma of Al Capone, Chiraq became the new name for a city associated with violence. Prior to the release of the McDonald video, Rahm Emanuel himself complained that the Black Lives Matters movement had induced the police to go “fetal” for fear of becoming the next poster child for police misconduct. His comment was telling of the sort of orders he was giving to the cops – push hard, be pro-active, and pull out all the stops to tamp down the violent crime rate. Ever y thing changed when the McDonald video dropped. Homan Square, Chicago’s very own Black Site, has gone without a Chief for months, its Gang Enforcement Unit, an elite hit squad, has been disbanded, and we can safely assume that the massive quantity of data housed on Homan Square’s servers is being purged of anything untoward. The U.S. Department of Justice is beginning a civil rights investigation of the Chicago Police Department, so the bully boys are being pulled off the streets, friendlier faces are being promoted, and all the skeletons in the CPD closet are getting buried.

The power vacuum this creates on the streets has already resulted in a spike in violent crime. In the long run, less aggressive policing will reduce the tension on the streets, allowing communities to return to their own sociological equilibrium. It was the late Richard J. Daley who noted that: “The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder.” But in the short run, Rahm Emanuel finds himself between a rock and a hard place. Violent crime damages his image as a competent manager. But police misconduct damages his image as well. It will be next to impossible for him to reduce violent crime with the DOJ breathing down his neck about police misconduct. He can address police misconduct, but he’ll have to rely on the communities to resolve the problem of violence. And they can’t do that without the resources they need to address the issue.

by Jerry Boyle

ECONOMIC INEQUALITY

RAHM FEELS THE BERN

The national trend of in-migration to urban areas by young, affluent white voters has changed the political dynamics of the city. Rahm Emanuel was elected largely by a combination of white voters from the old ethnic areas on the fringes of the city and the newer gentrified areas which have spread out from the city center. Emanuel relies on voters who want their tax dollars to stay in their neighborhoods, and resent any cross-subsidy to areas in need. Rahm relentlessly caters to that constituency. Affluent areas are showered with city resources, while struggling neighborhoods suffer cuts. The dirty secret of Chicago police deployment strategy is that the police are sent in droves to affluent areas to protect property, while poor neighborhoods get lean and mean “Wolf Packs” of predatory tactical units to enforce control. The money goes where the money comes from, and those without money get menaced, imprisoned, and killed. But although economic inequality hurts no-one so much as it hurts Black and Latino communities, it’s an issue with a broader impact which affects even the traditional white ethnic residents and, recently, even Rahm’s base of support among affluent white voters.

The most interesting thing about the movement behind Bernie Sanders in Chicago is its relative homogeneity. Sanders has yet to expand his base here much beyond the young, techsavvy Berniebots which characterize his movement nationally. While the Berniebots are certainly sympathetic to other constituencies, and have made a meaningful effort to reach out, for instance, to the Black Lives Matter movement, and to the unions, for now at least it’s pretty much a young, white demographic. How that ultimately shakes out for Sanders in the polling place is anyone’s guess. But locally that demographic presents a threat to the power structure established by Rahm Emanuel. Young white voters are Rahm’s core electoral base, and his identification with the neo-liberal Hillary Clinton jeopardizes his standing with that demographic. His longtime friendship with Bruce Rauner (a/k/a Governor Hedge Fund) doesn’t help. While Rahm’s unsavory associations might not normally hurt him so long as his voter base is focused on local issues, the Sanders phenomenon undermines his ideological support. And one local issue could indeed deliver a mortal blow to that support.

EDUCATION It was the Chicago teachers who gave Emanuel his first major failure. His effort to force his privatization agenda failed spectacularly when the teachers bested him in a strike in 2012. The teachers are currently negotiating another contract, and this negotiation is seriously complicated by a state budget impasse provoked by Rahm’s buddy Rauner. Without a state bailout, it appears unlikely that Rahm and the teachers will be able to square the circle of education finance. Another strike and/or a massive layoff of teachers loom on the horizon. Such a breakdown of the public education system could be the perfect storm for every major issue facing Chicago. It would highlight economic inequality by dumping public school kids on the streets, a sharp contrast with those safely ensconced in private and charter schools. It would shut down the school-to-prison pipeline, but could well shift that pipeline to streets filled with young people with nothing better to do than get hassled by cops, risking more spectacular incidents of police misconduct. It would focus the public mind on how we have balkanized the tax and spending bases at both the state and local levels to favor business and affluent voters. And it just might be sufficient to energize support for a Presidential candidate with a Neo-New Deal platform opposed to the neo-liberalism of Rahm Emanuel, Bruce Rauner, and Hillary Clinton. Could Clinton lose the Democratic primary to Sanders in her home state? It might seem farfetched to imagine that. But if our school system fails before the March primary, Clinton’s political career might end where it began, in Chicago, that most American of cities.

CROSSROADS

IT’S HAPPENING HERE

Your Local Library — Use It or Lose It!

By Joe Collier

Chicago Survivors and Chicago’s Citizens for Change

One of the first actions Rahm Emanuel took when he became Mayor was to cut the Chicago Public Library’s budget—originally planned for $10 million, but after pushback from librarians, friends of the library and community members from around the city, he reduced the cuts to just $7 million (publiclibraries. com, 11/4/2011) Even before Rahm was elected, in 2009 CPL cut its weekly hours from 64 to 48 in most of its 75 branches, and fired a significant number of its pages—the folks who reshelve library materials—over 100 positions that couldn’t be refilled due to a hiring freeze instituted by Mayor Daley (Chicago Tribune, 12/4/09). The resulting loss in services has never been recovered, and if the trend continues there’s a real concern that branches may start to be closed. Given Rahm’s track record so far, you can bet that they’ll likely be the branches in parts of the city where people need their unique resources—such as access to the internet, job seeking and resume help—the most. As more and more politicians and municipalities slash library budgets and fail in their commitment to lifelong learning and open public access to information, the time for action is now. Never before in our long history of supporting open and equal access to information in this country have public libraries faced such challenges to justify their own existence. What once was seen as an unshakeable institution is now being relegated in some corners of society to the scrap heap as irrelevant and dispensable. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth—public libraries continue to be important, dynamic centers of their communities connecting citizens with any number of resources, from books and DVDs to online databases and instructional classes and more. But if I asked you what you thought about your local library, what would you say? If I asked you when was the last time you set foot inside it, would it be even within the past year? Luckily for me, I don’t have to, because the Pew Research Center has already taken care of it.

You probably won’t be surprised to find out that most people still hold public libraries in high regard—91% of Americans say libraries are important to their community as a whole and 76% say libraries are important to them and their family (Pew Research Center, 8/18/14). Large majorities of Americans see libraries as part of the educational ecosystem and as resources for promoting digital and information literacy. Those 16 and older are quite clear that libraries should address the educational needs of their communities at many levels—85% of Americans say that libraries should “definitely” coordinate with schools in providing resources for children. 85% also say that libraries should “definitely” offer free literacy programs to help kids prepare for school. 78% believe that libraries are effective at promoting literacy and love of reading. And 65% maintain that libraries contribute to helping people decide what information they can trust (Pew Research Center, 9/15/15). And yet, not many people are actually using the library—46% of all Americans ages 16 and over say they visited a library or a bookmobile inperson in the prior year. This is roughly comparable with the 48% who said this in 2013, but down from 53% in 2012 (Pew Research Center, 8/18/14). Again, no big surprise here but civic activists are more likely to use libraries. In the past year, 23% of Americans ages 16 and over say they worked with fellow citizens to address a problem in their community. Among those who have done this, 63% visited the library in the prior year, compared with 40% who had not participated with others in tackling a community problem. 28% attended a meeting at the library in the prior year, compared with 11% who had not worked with others on a community problem. Some 11% of Americans say they have actively worked with others to influence government policy in the prior year. Among those who did this, 59% paid a visit to the library in the prior year, compared with 44% who had not worked with others in influencing a government policy. 33% had gone to a meeting at the library in the prior year vs. 13% who had not joined with others to influence government (Pew Research Center, 9/15/15) Why are libraries still chronically under-utilized, and now more than ever forced to justify their existence? My (substantiated only anecdotally) theory is that it relates to the larger is-

sue of economic inequality. The overriding perception of public libraries for decades has been that of the archive; the local repository of knowledge and information set up to be the most effective way of ensuring guaranteed open access to all. I mean, the idea of open and free access to information is something we can all get behind, right? Plus, we didn’t really have a better option so we went with it. And it’s funded by everyone according to their means. Along came the Internet, however, and along with it the idea that it contained all knowledge and information, and that at the push of a button, or a few keywords searched. It doesn’t matter that the reality is a bit more complex than that, but the idea that the internet had “replaced” libraries became commonplace, so that people—while still respecting the ideal of the public library—also decided that they didn’t really need it, because they had Amazon, and iTunes and Netflix, etc. And when you’re paying for something—in this case in the form of property taxes—that you feel like you don’t need, it’s not long before you want to stop paying for it. Can you imagine living in a community without a public library? That just sounds horrible. But that’s what will happen unless a change in public thinking can be sparked. It’s up to libraries and friends of libraries to change the way everyone else thinks. One effective strategy to employ if you’re serious about having some influence in the direction of your local library is to either try and get a seat on the board yourself, or find a likeminded candidate and help put them in place. And of course — ACTUALLY USE YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY! Book a room and have a meeting of your local hobby club. Start a book discussion group, and work with librarians to get copies for everyone. Get help writing a resume or a business plan. Attend a class, and learn how to do something new like knit, or code, or design and 3D print something — and bring a friend! On your way out, grab that second season of that show you’ve been meaning to catch up on. And so much more — find out what’s special about your library. I bet there is a lot on offer that you didn’t even know about. If you’re paying rent or property taxes, you’re a stakeholder in your local library and everything it has to offer — so take advantage!

By Kyle Gaffin

Joy McCormack is the Founder & President of Chicago’s Citizens for Change and Chicago Survivors. Herself a survivor, Joy lost a son to a random and senseless act of gun violence. I asked her to share her story and discuss her work with me, to show how the voices of survivors are key to combating the normalization of violence in Chicago and to the process of bringing about change on this issue.

An Interview with Joy Mc Cormack

Kyle Gaffin

Please tell me a little bit about Chicago’s Citizens for Change and Chicago Survivors, both of which you founded.

Joy McCormack

Chicago’s Citizens for Change is the non-profit organization that runs the Chicago Survivors program. We have many partners across the city. One that we’ve been working on for four or five years now is with DePaul University and Chicago Public Schools in a program called Community Peacemakers. We identify those college students that want to be Peace Ambassadors and pair them with CPS teachers, who then teach a non-violence curriculum in high schools for a period of five months. At the end of it, the kids in the program create a peace project for their school.

What is the main focus of your work through these organizations?

Chicago’s Citizens for Change basically looks at violence prevention, and we look at the ways in which the survivor experience both needs to be addressed and can be used to move things forward. So, for example, with the Community Peacemakers program, when I or another survivor goes to a high school to talk about our experiences, that brings a lived reality to violence that goes beyond stereotypes. With Chicago Survivors, it’s really crime victim services, that’s really what we do. And it’s unfortunate that there’s a need for this kind of organization, but when I lost someone to gun violence, my own needs were not being addressed by anyone, and that’s true across the country:

unless you have a case that goes through the legal system and becomes solved, there’s absolutely no crimes services that are provided to you. But as crime victims – and immediate family members of victims are still considered crime victims under the law – we are entitled to certain services that weren’t being provided here in Illinois, and frankly aren’t being provided across the country. So, given our personal experience, we decided that the first thing we really needed to do before we could have any part in bringing about meaningful change was just acknowledge that this was happening and to help people through this process. The process that we went through is not just so emotionally devastating because of the trauma and the grief that we were going through, but because of these systems that you are thrown into that are just a world of chaos. And most people don’t have the resources to know how to handle any of it. It’s a very difficult, complicated process, and we hope that we are helping people who are going through it. And not only helping them but empowering them to the point where we can stand together as survivors and have a collective voice that does bring change forward. So we’ve been involved in all kinds of things. We support arts programs, like Collaboraction, which does a lot of different things throughout the course of the year, like performances, and we’ll come in and participate in talkbacks afterwards from the survivors’ perspective. We’ve been involved in plays, we’ve been involved in books, we’ve been involved in movies. The whole notion is to get past the statistics and the stereotypes because our city has normalized violence, we’re predominantly numb to the experience. Numb, either because we think it’s not our problem or we’re drowning in it and we feel hopeless and helpless to do anything about it. Either way, we’ve come to accept this as normal in Chicago. There’s nothing normal about a parent burying a child. That’s not normal. And that’s what hundreds of our families have to do every year.

Could you tell me a little bit about your story and how you got involved with this issue?

JM:

I’ve lived in Chicago a long time, most of my childhood and all of my adult life. I had intentionally chosen to raise children in the city because I wanted them to be well-rounded, and I was afraid that if I raised two Latino men in the suburbs, that they would be the token Mexican kids in class and I didn’t want that for them. So I felt like as a family, the city presented a place where we would be both safe and presented enough diversity that we could fit in as a family. So we were very intentional about parenting choices, one of which was to raise kids in the city of Chicago. I had two boys, and we lived on the Northwest side of the city. Homeowners, professionals, well-educated, kind of doing all the things that our society tells us, “If you do these things, you’ll have a good life.” And we did them. And we’re really blessed and fortunate to have a lot to appreciate. Good family, good home, kids were doing all the right things. The elder of my two sons, Frankie, was just a superstar. He was ver y passionate about politics, he worked on the Obama campaign, went to Iowa to do that, travelled across the world by studying abroad and through service projects through his school, DePaul University. He was doing all the right things. And he really had some theories about what it meant to be a man of color in the city and really wanted to influence young Latino men in particular. He felt like he didn’t have enough role models, so as he came into his own around 18 years old, he started asking himself what it meant to be a man, and we would have these big conversations about what that was. And he found a little bit of an idol in then-Senator Obama, that’s why he started following him, started reading everything you could find while he was in Iowa working on the campaign. Just very passionate about life and the world and he really believed that he was going to have an impact on this world, particularly on Chicago. He loved Chicago. He would say, “I was born here and I’ll die here.” I just never could have imagined what would happen at the time. Frankie was a senior at DePaul University, he could have graduated early but he wanted to stay on because he had a lot of commitments on campus, he was a mentor in a lot of different programs, in leadership roles at DePaul University and had really made a name for himself there and was really looking forward to going to law school. He was nominated to intern at the White House and right when this happened, we were at this sort of pinnacle where everything was so perfect. We had just learned that Frankie was to receive the Lincoln Laureate award from

then-Governor Quinn. We were very excited for him, and I remember one of my colleagues asking me, “How’s Frankie?” and I just felt like he was unstoppable. And it really looked like it, I thought, he’s 21, he made it, we made it. It’s October, we’d just gotten this great news, we were supposed to be travelling to Springfield to get the Lincoln Laureate Award from Gov. Quinn. And Frankie on Halloween night goes to a Halloween party. He originally was supposed to go to some other party with some friends in Wrigleyville, but one of his high school friends who he was supposed to go with ended up cancelling on him. So he was sitting there at School and Sheffield with Daisy Camacho, one of his friends from college, with whom Frankie had travelled together abroad and shared a lot in common, and he started telling her about his family history in Chicago. So she said, “I want to share some of my history with you, too.” She invited him to go to a party with her at a house that some of her friends from Elgin had rented. They went to a neighborhood that had gone through some gentrification. Frankie didn’t know anybody there except for her. Just about ten minutes after they got there, he was on the second floor with Daisy, kind of oblivious to everything that was hap-

pening, and some gangbangers from the neighborhood came to try to crash the party. The hosts of the party asked them to leave, so they did, they left quietly, they didn’t cause a scene, the cops were not called. Frankie and Daisy had no idea this had even happened. About ten minutes later the last guest that Daisy wanted Frankie to meet is about to arrive, so they go downstairs to open the door and wait outside to greet the guest.

At that very moment the gangbangers who had tried to crash the party earlier returned with a TEC-9, a semi-automatic weapon, and they opened fire and murdered our son.

KG:

I’m so sorry for your loss. That’s devastating.

It is, for so many reasons. We don’t believe Frankie was the intended target, there’s just no reason for him to have been. We were thrown into this world of chaos, which resulted in us going through two murder trials in two years, with the shooter sentenced to 90 years and the person who gave the gun sentenced to 70. But in the immediacy of it, it was absolutely devastating. Even to this day, I can’t understand it, I can’t understand how these kids had access to a TEC-9 semi-automatic weapon that they bought for 300 dollars. I don’t understand how that happened. I don’t understand how I believed like so many other people that hear about this stuff, that this was somebody else’s problem. I did live in a good neighborhood and my kids went to good schools and they were good people – these things don’t happen to them. And when we were thrown into it, at first I was debilitated, and then I found that there was a lot of public interest in this case, because of who Frankie was, and so there was a ton of media and a ton of pressure from organizations that tried to get us out and into activism. And so I started going out, and when I did, every time I went out, first of all, I felt like I was encountering more chaos – there were all these organizations, but it was all chaos, what were they actually doing? What were they actually helping? And then I was meeting other parents, parents who were looking for help, who wanted to find other people like us to relate to, and that’s really why the organization started. So six months after Frankie’s murder, we started Chicago’s Citizens for Change, and our first goal was really to begin to provide outreach to families who were thrown into the same chaos we were, so that we could find each other and stand together. Since then, it’s evolved quite a bit into being a much more fully developed program with an office and staff. In September we went city-wide, which means that we respond to every single homicide in Chicago, so that no family in Chicago walks alone. It took five years for that to happen.

Do you still see some chaos in how activist groups have been working on this issue, or have you seen a change towards more unity?

Not as much as there needs to be. What’s hard – and again, it was sort of my naïveté, as I come from a professional background, not a non-profit one – I just assumed that people in the non-profit world were there for the right reasons, and that everybody was there because they really were fighting for change, and that’s not always that case. People have all kinds of agendas and people are looking to make a name for themselves, and there are political agendas and monetary agendas. It’s incredible that that’s the reality, but it’s not as nice and pretty as one would like to think that that world is. We encountered lots of issues ourselves with people who tried to work with us, or stood with us while the cameras were there, who even used us to try to get information about our cases, because they had ties to the gangs themselves. There’s a lot of corruption and chaos, in ways that I would never have imagined. And I felt like there were a lot of people out there saying, “I do this, and we do this...” but nobody was doing anything! And I just wanted to blow through it all. You could be out there all day long saying you’re doing all these things, but at the end of the day what I wanted to know was that for families like my own who were thrown into these experiences, that they weren’t by themselves, that somebody was holding their hand, that somebody was walking them through this process. That they could come and find that they had a family, a network of people who could relate, because, honestly, no matter how many times I try to explain this, there’s no way to fully describe this experience. There’s no way to describe what it means to have this person who means everything to you in your life, and the next day is just gone. And they’re not gone like they ran away or they got sick – they got taken from you, violently. Somebody took their life and they didn’t deserve it. And how do you relate to other people when you’re dealing with the consequences of that? PTSD, panic attacks, anxiety, depression, complicated grief, maybe a lack of resources, maybe you lose your job or you can’t work as much because you are dealing with those consequences. There’s so much aftermath that happens – it’s not just emotional, it’s also physical and tangible. People lose their jobs, become homeless, families split, kids and parents become disassociated, it’s bad. And someone has to help people deal with that trauma, and it just wasn’t happening.

Is there a way in which this work of helping people deal with the trauma of losing someone to senseless violence is also a means to help prevent future violence – that intervening and helping at the stage of trauma prevents a kind of vicious cycle of violence and reactive violence from growing or expanding?

JM I think there’s a real belief that people affected by violence tend to become perpetrators. I don’t believe that. I do believe that the circles around people affected by violence tend to react violently – it’s not usually the parents or siblings or the immediate family members of someone who’s loved that retaliate, but it could be people in their network – cousins, school friends, neighbors, gang members who react in that way. But I don’t know if there’s a higher propensity to violence in that way among victims. What there is, though, particularly for youth – you’re talking to a grown woman, but what about my surviving son, who was a senior in high school at the time? He has to believe in a future, has to work hard to believe that hope is worthwhile, that it means something to try and build a life. It’s very difficult for a young person to carry this experience and still believe in this notion of a happy life. Many, many surviving children are dealing with such severe consequences of this experience, emotionally, physiologically, so that, whether it’s because their brain is still developing, or other factors, because – you know, my son lost Frankie, but he also lost his parents too, because I couldn’t be there for him, I stopped parenting him, so his whole world crashes around him at a time when what he needs the most is his family. And what happens to kids? They start to build walls, and they find emotional resources in other places – for some kids that means getting involved in very high-risk behaviors, whether it’s that they stop going to school, or they start self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, they get involved in sexually high-risk behaviors, there’s just a myriad of aftermath. So it’s not necessarily violence or retaliation in that way, but they are much

more likely to become involved in highrisk behaviors and to become a victim in other ways because of this experience. It’s really important that when we provide our services, we don’t just provide them to a single survivor, but to the family unit with the goal to keep that family together as much intact as it can be. It’s never going to be what it was, but as much intact as it can be so that there’s a better chance for these young children and adolescent survivors to move forward. It’s taken us a lot of work and a lot of years of proving ourselves for people to be able to give us a chance to do this work in the meaningful way that we want to. It’s just now happening, and we want to fight the normalization of the experi-

ence – where no one is reacting and coming out and telling you that something really bad happened, so that in neighborhoods saturated with violence, it becomes normal. It becomes expected. And we had to change that by reaching out and letting communities know that we are there, saying, “This really terrible thing happened, this is really awful. We want you to help us, whether it’s by bringing information that might help get a crime solved, or we want you to stand with a family at a vigil. We want you to stand with a family and start to get past the normalization of violence, when there’s just nothing normal about it.”

What are the keys to getting people to realize just how not normal that is – both in communities that are saturated by violence, and those that don’t experience it as much – and to galvanize them to action?

Well, that’s one reason why I share my story the way that I do. I don’t think Frankie is better than a kid who happened to grow up in Englewood who never got to leave Chicago, who never travelled anywhere, who didn’t get good grades. I don’t talk about him the way that I do because I think he’s better than anyone else. I talk about him the

way that I do because I think it’s an experience that people can relate to. If it can happen to me it can happen to others. That’s how we do it. We talk about who people were, the families that they come from, to stop throwing statistics out there. We promote sharing those experiences. That’s why we’ve been involved in so many art projects, because we want our experiences shared. Not only because we all feel legacies of our loved ones that we want to carry forward, but also because we want people who don’t think this is their problem to see how it could be. If you think about how this has changed in the last years, one of the big things that started to affect our country was what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary school [in Newtown, CT], because we couldn’t blame it on the six-year olds in the way we blame it on the fifteen-year old who gets murdered in Englewood, right? We saw those little faces and as a country we got scared. So scared that millions of people got involved, they started caring about these issues, they started paying attention to voting about gun laws, about sensible gun controls. We now have programs like Moms Demand Action, which is basically representative of soccer moms across the country. Most of them are not affected by gun violence, they haven’t been affected by it, and they don’t want to be. When you start to create those bridges, something happens. And it’s not going to change overnight, it takes a lot of work for that to change, but there are a lot of opportunities to impact it, and I think that those are all starting to happen, and that’s beautiful. So I think the way that this dialogue shifts is people talk about their stories and we listen and we get past statistics, and we come to realize this isn’t an us vs. them proposition. It’s not a, “Well, as long as I don’t live in those neighborhoods and my kids don’t do those things, that can’t happen to me.” You start to hear that these are things that happen all across our city no matter where you live. And you start to care. And it’s not easy, it’s not easy to get people to care about this – this isn’t the Kardashians, right? This is real stuff, and for a lot of people it’s really depressing. But I would say that you can care about it and still have your “normal bubble” – go fight and protect that normal bubble, because I certainly wish I had been a part of the fight before this came into my life. If I could have done anything I would have. And I fight for it because I want to have grandchildren who don’t have to live in a world where this is what they have to be afraid of. I don’t want to raise future generations in my family where they have to even consider these issues.

Activists

History Can Inspire New Activists

By Amanda Scotese

Julieanna Richardson

In considering political and social activism in our communities, we may think of protestors with signs or petitioners knocking on doors. Let’s hope these old-fashioned means never fade, and let’s consider that both these examples are forms of media. To communicate the ideas that spark political and social change, one must The HistoryMakers say that they interview “both well-known wield media. and unsung African-Americans,” and they have made these interviews available to everyone on their website. Users can Whatever search under occupation categories like ArtMakers, Civicthe media may Makers, ScienceMakers, and MediaMakers. The less “unsung” names you can encounter include President Barack Obama, recorded when he was Senator, local figure Timuel be, across Black, writer Maya Angelou, and civic activist Reverend Jesse history this fact Jackson. Each person’s webpage includes a written biography as well. Any current-day activist knows for whom the bell holds true. I first encountered The HistoryMakers, a non-profit video archive, when I was researching Chicago jazz and blues history and the Great Migration a few years ago. I was hoping to find video of first-hand stories told from the people who had lived the history, and was having no luck - either I was finding Studs Terkel talking about the blues or the Great Migration discussed in big, sweeping statistics rather than the everyday realities of life at the time. And then someone told me about The HistoryMakers video archive. Located quietly within a terracotta-faced building in the South Loop, The HistoryMakers has done a lot of talking within the African-American community. The following sounds like a bold claim, but it’s true – this nonprofit has created the largest collection of African American oral histories. The HistoryMakers has produced 2,700 recorded interviews with people from 39 states, totaling around 9,000 hours of footage.

tolls, that he or she follows in the footsteps of previous generations while forging forward in making the world a better place. The HistoryMakers connects the stories of present and past activists with the aspiring minds of the social changers of the future. I had a chance to chat with Julieanna Richardson, Founder and Executive Director of The HistoryMakers. Richardson mentioned how as a child, she felt she didn’t have a place or a history because of the absence of African-American history in schools and in the media. When she moved to Chicago in 1980 with a fresh law degree in hand, she discovered a city with a vibrant black culture in the present day, and a rich history of its past. After years of practicing corporate law, she managed her own television production company. Over the years, Richardson had noticed that while names of prominent African-American figures in history like Harriet Tubman came up over and over, the stories of so many other African-Americans were being overlooked. So in 1999, Richardson founded The HistoryMakers, with a mission to provide a more widely encompassing view of African-American history.

“We want to unmarginalize people who have been historically marginalized,” Richardson said. "A society can’t be whole if it doesn’t acknowledge all of its parts in a real way.” Within the thousands of hours of footage, interviewees tell stories of the challenges, traumatic events, opportunities, and extraordinary feats of their lives to share the culture of the African-American experience. One example would be Harry Belafonte, who told Martin Luther King, “You take care of the movement and I will take care of your family." You can hear Angela Davis, former member of the Black Panther party, speaking very matter-of-factly about being on the run from the Feds and wearing a wig in disguise when she went to the movie theater. Katherine Dunham, who is considered to be the creator of modern black dance, tells of family dynamics that we might not expect in the past: her mother was 20 years older than her father, and most of the women in her troupe in the 1930s and 1940s were married to white men. You can also hear her describe how her legs were insured for a quarter of a million dollars when she starred in the film, "Cabin in the Sky."

thehistorymakers .com

While the interviews are from people across the countr y, some are distinctly Chicago-based. You can learn of the Willis Wagons of the ‘60s, which were trailers that were installed at overcrowded segregated schools. You can hear firsthand experiences of the Great Migration, such as arriving in Chicago via the Illinois Central Railroad and getting off at the long-ago demolished Central Station. Initially Richards and her team at The HistoryMakers set out to record the stories of the older generation, before those stories were gone forever. They are now also seeking out young voices, like New York Times columnist Charles Blow, or MSNBC Political Commentator Melissa Harris-Perry. The only other time in history that it has been attempted to amass specifically African-American oral histories was during the Works Projects Administration of the 1930s. These interviews were primarily the stories of former slaves. The HistoryMakers seeks to include successful leaders and creators within American history. As an activist herself Richardson says, “I want to change the narratives and the perceptions of the African-American community based on what actually happened as opposed to the stereotypes that permeate today’s society and world perceptions. I want to provide young people of color and other groups with role models of people who worked to overcome tremendous odds. I want to mainstream this history.” Her goals are wide-reaching, as well as more local. Alas, as we all know, a lot of change is desperately needed with Chicago Public Schools, and Richardson is disappointed with the school system’s approach to teaching black history. The curriculum focuses primarily on slavery, despite being located in arguably one of the strongest black communities in the nation. The HistoryMakers has been in discussion with Chicago Public Schools for over a year to try to integrate their stories within their curriculum, but to no avail.

Richardson want s to use these oral histories to share a more positive and inclusive history. She says, “Chicago needs to do a much better job of teaching its own children of the rich history that they know so little about. African-American school students do not even know about Mayor Harold Washington.” Richardson stresses the importance of history in creating a sense of belonging. “There is something about knowing where you come from that gives a person roots, a sense of place, and a sense of belonging.” The next generation of political and social activists needs to know about the historic political issues that still exist. As writer George Santayana said: "Those who are unaware of history are destined to repeat it."

Ne Ac

I asked Richardson how these interviews could be important to budding activists, and she responded, “It is important that they do not make the same mistakes and learn from others’ mistakes and triumphs so that they can really create sustainable change.”

As with any activist cause, a challenge is not in making the message, but to figure out how best to disseminate it. Some of the videos are available for free viewing on The HistoryMakers website, but a paid membership is required for full access. Currently, The HistoryMakers online archive has users from 51 countries. It was big news last year that the Library of Congress accepted the collection, but one must physically go to the institution’s reading room in Washington D.C.; otherwise, one can pay a $30 monthly fee for remote access. It’s not a large price to pay when one considers the amount of work it has taken Richardson and her entire non-profit team to conduct background research, videotape, edit, transcribe, encode, digitize, archive and then disseminate all these videos. Lastly, but not least importantly, the organization has an annual outreach event called "Back to School with The HistoryMakers" each September. Successful African-Americans visit 400 schools around the country to share their personal stories to young students. As they share of their life paths, the hope is that they may inspire these potential creators, leaders or activists to make their own history, too. Whether it's face to face, or in a video interview, the medium and the message need to be shared to foster change.

CHECK THAT GUN By Kyle Gaffin

responsible for supplying many guns in Chicago streets. I mean, one of these dealers sells one in twelve crime guns in Chicago [Chuck’s Gun Shop in Riverdale, IL]. We go after them on the legislative front, trying to force them to reform that way, but we also put community pressure on them. Take Father Mike Pfleger [of the Faith Community of St. Sabina in Auburn Gresham], he is out there talking about this issue every single day, that’s an example of public pressure. And then Brady will sue bad apple dealers on behalf of the victims of the crimes they helped facilitate, and reform them that way. This was the case with Badger Guns [in Milwaukee, WI], a dealer who knowingly sold to straw purchasers, people who buy guns for someone who shouldn’t have them. So it’s not entirely legislative, there’s also this large community organizing aspect.

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN GRUBER

On the legislative front, what have you found to be the biggest challenges?

Kyle Gaffin

What is the focus of your work at the Brady Campaign?

John Gruber

The Brady Campaign is one of the oldest national gun violence prevention organizations in America. It is named after its founders, Jim and Sarah Brady. Jim Brady was Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, who was shot during the assassination attempt on Reagan, suffering debilitating injuries. Following that, they devoted their lives to keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people, ensuring that people who should not have guns due to mental or criminal factors are not able to get them. In 1994, President Clinton signed the Brady Background Check bill into law after years of lobbying by Jim and Sarah. But it didn’t cover everything. We spoke with John Gruber, a campaign manager at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence here in Chicago, to learn more about the continued work of this organization.

We really focus on three things: We focus on closing every loophole, so that every gun in America is sold with a background check, whether it’s your cousin selling you a gun, or it’s online, or at a gun show. The second thing we focus on is going after the “bad apple” gun dealers.

there was a story out of Idaho where a two-year old reached inside his mother’s purse in a Wal-Mart, grabbed his mother’s gun and fatally shot her. It’s really a public pressure campaign, promoting safe storage, asking if there are guns in your children’s lives. If you bring your child over to someone else’s house, you might ask, “Is the liquor cabinet locked?” Similarly, you should ask, “Do you have a gun? Is it locked up?” So those are our three focuses, and we have 91 chapters nationwide, including the Million Mom March.

Only 5% of gun dealers sell 90% of guns used in crimes.

With objectives like closing loopholes and reforming bad apple dealers, is most of your work legislative and policy oriented?

So we look at how gun dealers end up in that very small number of dealers that supply most of the crime guns in America. And we see that they are doing the bare minimum that they are required to do. So we go after those dealers and ask them to reform their businesses. The third thing is our ASK campaign, which seeks to keep guns out of the hands of children. You know, there’s a litany of news stories involving kids that get their hands on a parent’s gun because it’s unlocked and loaded and shoot themselves or another person –

With closing the loopholes, yes, it is mostly legislative. President Obama recently clarified what it means to be engaged in the business of selling guns, but that’s not really going to stop that many sales. There will still be many sales without a background check, which is why we need Congress to pass expanded Brady background checks for all gun sales. But if you look at bad apple dealers, there are a lot of things that must happen. For example, in Chicago, they have identified the bad apple gun dealers that are

JG I think the biggest challenge is that despite the fact that 85% of Americans support expanding background checks to all gun sales, and most NRA members support it when they actually look at the facts, the dominance of gun manufacturers in the NRA impedes much progress. Which is not how it used to be. The NRA used to support expanding background checks, but that’s changed as manufacturers have become so dominant and so powerful in that organization. They use fear and lies to misinform people, and the worst part is they use a lot of money to stop people [who are

pushing for reform] from presidential candidates on down to local, state, and Congressional representatives. The other very powerful thing they have in terms of social outreach success is this group of people that are so angry and good at yelling, and they are damn persistent. So you look at that dynamic and see this organization, whose sole objective is basically selling more guns, misleading the American people and hindering the government from making real reforms. I think that is our biggest obstacle.

You mentioned earlier President Obama’s recent executive actions and his comments related to gun safety measures. Do you see that as a signal that some real change is going to be happening in the coming years, or are you doubtful?

I’m optimistic about it, and I think the whole movement is optimistic. What President Obama did is not going to stop the gun problem in America. It’s pretty hard to count the number of guns out there, but it’s a lot – 300 million is one estimate. I don’t think it’s going to stop gun violence anytime soon, but I think what President Obama did was a first step. It was taking a stand, saying, “Being a Democrat and being in this office means being responsible.” He took a step this Congress wouldn’t, and what he does can be picked up by the next presidential candidate. It’s now entered the mainstream conversation. If you look at marriage equality, for example, it’s similar. There were setbacks – Massachusetts legalized gay marriage, and then there was DOMA, and Prop 8 in California. It’s this back and forth. But you look at this moment and you see it becoming a major part of public conversation when it wasn’t before. And I think if you look to history, the side of common sense always prevails, and there’s only so much fear mongering that can happen. I do think we’ve hit this tipping point in America, where people are starting to look at things differently. Because these mass shootings keep on happening, people are really, I think, becoming more enlightened and looking at the facts on this issue. So I think the NRA’s hold is going to be more and more based on money and funding instead of perhaps public opinion. It’s become more commonplace to understand and promote common sense gun laws. I also think we are going to see more of a movement for social responsibility. You are going to see more on domestic abuse and how that ties in with gun violence.

You’re going to see more on bad apple dealers.

You’ve worked in other states besides Illinois. How do Illinois’ gun laws stack up against other states?

Illinois actually has moderately good gun laws, we have a FOID card system, Chicago has great gun laws, though Chicago’s not the whole state, and when you get out of Cook County it’s easier to get guns. But if you look at the states bordering Illinois, they have terrible gun laws. Missouri, right next door, Indiana, terrible gun laws, Wisconsin, pretty bad gun laws. But it’s those states with terrible gun laws that contribute 60% of the guns to the gun violence problem in Chicago. Across the nation, though, you see this trend that states with better gun laws do have fewer gun deaths. But let’s compare New York, LA, and Chicago – they all have pretty strong gun laws. Of the three, New York has the lowest gun violence rate, but it is bordered by Connecticut and New Jersey, which also have strong gun laws. LA has fewer gun deaths per person than Chicago, but also sits next to Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, where guns are smuggled in. So it’s not necessarily about how one state’s gun laws impact its own gun problem – they do impact it – but if you’re a state sitting next to another state with terrible gun laws, then you’re still going to have a terrible gun violence problem.

We are not trying to control people or control guns, we just want to make sure that guns don’t get into the hands of the wrong people. KG How can people take action on this issue through the Brady Campaign?

JG You can go to bradycampaign.org and explore and learn more. A quick thing that doesn’t cost any money is you call your Congressperson wherever you are and you say, “I support expanded Brady background checks.” There’s that line from, I think, President Roosevelt: “Give me an excuse to do it.” Give them an excuse to vote their conscience. These legislators are with us, they just hear more from the other side than they do us. So we can change that dynamic. The other thing people can do is sign up to stop bad apple gun dealers, there are bad apple gun dealers in every state, every city, supplying guns for crimes. So they can sign up and get involved with the campaign, and do protests to increase public pressure for reform.

What can be done to address that? Can we make our borders less porous in that regard, or do we simply need a nationwide, uniform set of gun control laws?

“Roughly 70 percent: Gun owners who purchased their most recent gun. Roughly 30 percent: Gun owners who did not purchase their most recent gun, instead obtaining it through a transfer (i.e., a gift, an inheritance, a swap between friends). Zeroing in on the population of gun buyers, about 34 percent did not go through a background check. Among the gun owners who got their firearms through a transfer, roughly two-thirds did not go through a background check. Add it up, and it works out to: Roughly 60 percent: the share of gun owners surveyed who did go through a background check when they obtained (through sale or transfer) their latest gun. Roughly 40 percent: the share of gun owners who did not.” Source: Kate Masters, “Just How Many People Get Guns Without a Background Check?” TheTrace.org, October 12, 2015.

bradycampaign .org

A couple things. There are many states that have passed expanded Brady Background checks and have seen a decrease in gun violence. That’s a fact. But we need a federal measure, because, again, if I live in California I am only as safe as the guns coming from Nevada. And the other thing is – and this is important – don’t use the term “gun control.” “Gun control” is bait language for people that immediately want to write you off. If you say, “gun violence prevention,” that’s more accurate.

A World Without Prisons

By Dan Sloan

Dan Sloan

There’s a quote from you that frames your work in a way I really like. In a November Truthout piece on your contribution to the Feminist Utopia Project you said,

“I am actively working toward abolition, which means that I am trying to create the conditions necessary to ensure the possibility of a world without prisons.” Could you talk about what you see as the necessary conditions for a world without prisons, and how you see your work with Project NIA, including your efforts to promote participatory community justice, as fitting into these conditions?

Mariame Kaba

A Conversation with Mariame Kaba

When we started talking about putting this issue together I knew immediately that I wanted to interview Mariame Kaba. Seeing her tweet from @prisonculture over the last several years has left me constantly amazed: even from that small window into her life, it’s mind-blowing how busy she always seems to be and how engaged in organizing work she is here in Chicago. Aside from founding and directing Project NIA, an organization devoted to ending youth incarceration, Mariame has been instrumental in such advocacy and education initiatives as the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against

Girls and Young Women, We Charge Genocide and others. And even with all that she somehow has time to dispense wisdom to the masses of schmucks like me on the Internet. Mariame graciously agreed to speak with me about her work— a transcript of our conversation follows.

Sure. I think I should start by saying that while I founded and direct Project NIA, I’m also politically committed to several other projects and organizations, groupings and efforts, that speak to the multiple ways that I see the forces of oppression manifesting themselves, not just in my own personal life but in the lives of other people. So abolition of prisons is one of my political commitments, one of the central commitments that I have, but it is also—the only way that prisons will be abolished is if other things transform and change, too— so I can’t imagine capitalism existing, at least in the way that it is currently configured, and prisons disappearing. I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think that we can end prisons without having economic justice, racial justice, other forms of justice.

So for my part, I have been trying to think about small projects that I could use to test out my ideas around addressing harm in my particular community, and finding a way through the addressing of that harm to give people options other than thinking of prison or punishment as the main way that we get accountability when people harm us. Project NIA has its roots in a question about how we might build a restorative community that could engender transformative justice. Would it be possible to incubate, catalyze, co-create projects that would test out that theory. And so, over the years we’ve supported projects like Circles and Ciphers, which is a youth-driven hip-hop leadership development program that uses restorative justice at its base to work with young people in conflict with the law, in the Rogers Park community initially but it has expanded beyond that now. And the work with those young people, some of whom are actually diverted from the criminal punishment system through that particular project, it’s a way to try to think through how we might have different spaces in the community so that people who are seen as either having caused harm or are targeted by the state as being harmful, would have an alternative other than the criminal punishment system as it’s set up.

So that’s just one sliver of that. I spent many years also as part of a project called INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, and INCITE! has contributed a lot to the thinking about the importance of inserting an analysis of race and gender within abolitionist spaces and abolitionist politics. So the issue around violence against women, girls and gender nonconforming people, you have to really take that seriously—that no one is going to sign up for the end of prisons, policing and surveillance without feeling like, “Well, we have something else that we can turn to that will bring accountability.” And so INCITE! has spent many years of having people write, think, workshop ideas about how we address harm outside of the current system that we have in place. And those are hard things— difficult, not quick— you know, it’s something that has to involve a whole community of people. It’s not just going to be the individual person versus the state, either the perpetrator or the victim and survivor, who doesn’t really have any real input in making decisions about how they want to have their accountability come down. They kind of have to give away their power to the state to take that on.

So what we’re trying to do, and what a big part of my life’s work has been, is to try to re-imagine new ways of trying to address accountability and get accountability for survivors of violence.

When one talks about community control of justice, many people would think of a so-called “community policing” program like CAPS. We Charge Genocide, a local group with which you’re involved, put out a great report this past fall arguing that CAPS and similar programs don’t actually lead to substantive changes in the relationships between communities and the police, and that they can actually serve to further marginalize the most vulnerable residents of communities. Can you talk about how you view CAPS and how you’d contrast it with a system that is meaningfully rooted in a community?

Yeah. So CAPS is obviously the Community Alternative Policing System here in Chicago, and the idea behind it was basically to bring the police to the community level in a way that— for example, in Chicago, in CAPS, a lot of the agenda setting, the meetings are run often, by the police themselves. And the CAPS report that you reference, that was put out by CounterCAPS which was part of the umbrella of We Charge Genocide, and written by Brendan McQuade, who took the observations of many of us who attend our CAPS meetings. We have a form we created to take

specific notes about what was happening in our CAPS meeting, during, I think it was May to October last year. And the idea was to distill what kinds of conversations happen at that level, what people are talking about in those groups. It turns out that a big part of what people are talking about is how to push people out of the community. It’s basically to figure out ways to ostracize and evict people from the neighborhood. Not to bring them in and to ask them, “If you are doing x, y, and z that we find undesirable, why are you doing that, and what can we do to mitigate that? What can we do to support you in a different way so that you don’t go down this road?” No, it’s basically that CAPS becomes the community-based counterinsurgency arm of the police in our communities. So folks who attend these meetings, they’re usually older in cer tain communities, they’re usually people who are homeowners so they’re concerned about their properties and their property values. Often they’re new arrivals, if you think about people who come to gentrifying communities, they can be younger, new white people who come to gentrify a particular community, they start coming to those meetings to basically have the police do the work they don’t want to do. “This person is dealing drugs out of their apartment, you need to talk to the landlord and make sure that person is gone. Young people are outside of our apartment at 12 o’clock at night, they’re playing in our alleyway and when we tell them to leave they don’t leave, so we want police patrols there now. We want you to be sitting outside our place at midnight. Or, we want you right outside of the school at 3pm because the kids are coming into the

store, and maybe some of them have shoplifted, or they’re loud, or they keep other people away.” We also found in some cases that some of these people have basically been deputized by the police and end up showing up at people’s trials and asking for harsher sentences for those people. Which is something that I hadn’t seen at my CAPS but apparently it happened at somebody else’s, and that was something interesting to learn. So what you end up with is having neighbors watch other people to inform on them to the police. And that is not rooted in any sort of model of restoration: it’s highly punitive, it’s focused on surveillance with a purpose of ostracizing and evicting people from their own community. And that’s not, in my mind, anything that would fit within a model of transformative justice at all. Very much focused on the traditional ways that we think about handling problems in our communities— punish people, take them out of the community, throw them out, make them disposable.

This might be a good time— I should have asked you this initially, but— could you give a brief overview of how you conceptualize transformative justice?

Sure. So people sometimes use restorative and transformative justice interchangeably. I very specifically mean very different things when I use restorative versus transformative justice. Often restorative justice is very much grounded in individual relationships between individual people, and solving individual conflicts in a way that would not rely on punishment but still afford people the accountability that they want and need as it relates to feeling as though their harms were heard, and acknowledged, and addressed. Restorative justice is very much at the individual level. And when you t alk about transformative justice, at least for myself, what I’m talking about is that individual relationships occur within larger constructs, and there are larger forces that impact our lives, which structure our relationships and our institutions. And so, you have to also fight in a col-

lective way against those forces of oppression. So while you’re addressing interpersonal conflicts and while you’re trying to make sure that people in communities know each other, have relationships with each other, have some tools to be able to address the issues that come, the harm that people cause. While that’s important, you also need to talk about making sure people have living wages so that they have a way to live and aren’t having to rely on the illegal or underground economies that are already criminalized to be able to make a living, but that they actually have the ability to take care of their needs. And it’s not just a living wage— it might also be that we need to be fighting for guaranteed jobs, or in some cases people like to talk about a basic income.

We also need to be really honest about anti-blackness and anti-black racism and racism in general, and make sure that we’re uprooting that form of oppression. We also need to be thinking about how we uproot gender-based oppression. We have to be really intentional about how we deal with disability-related forms of oppression. So you have to be fighting these macro-level forces and where you do that is by doing organizing that builds power among people, and that power that we build can then be used to push for the changes that we want to see at the macro-level, the systemic level. So transformative justice says that, yes, we’ve got to have these individual-level projects and individual-level attempts to address interpersonal harm, but that we’ll never be able to solve those personal harms without also doing the macro work,

because these things are reinforcing of each other. Because you can’t think about gun violence in a city like Chicago— which is a form of interpersonal violence— you can’t separate that from the structural reasons this is happening in particular communities and why it happens less in other communities. So transformative justice asks you to marry macro level organizing and analysis of oppression, to doing the work that you need to be doing on the ground on an individual level.

Could you talk a little bit more about your involvement with We Charge Genocide? When I heard the story of the youth delegation to the UN and the stand that they made I was really inspired and I’m sure that’s a very gratifying thing to be a part of.

So in May of 2014 a young man named Dominique Franklin, Jr., who was known as Damo by his friends, was tased by the Chicago Police Department. We still don’t know very much about what happened. The police department hasn’t really divulged very much information. But from reports of witnesses, immediate reports, it was said that they were trying to arrest Dominique out of Walgreens for stealing a pint of liquor or something, and that he was already handcuffed and when he tried to run away, he was tased twice and he fell and hit his head on a pole. He never recovered consciousness; he ended up dying in the hospital a few days after that incident. The reason that matters, at least for my involvement, was that Damo had started to get involved in the group that I mentioned before, Circles and Ciphers, which was a group that my organization, Project NIA, helped catalyze and incubate for several years until they went out on their own a year ago. But he started to get involved with that particular project and he was friends with some of the young people who I also know who are part of Circles and Ciphers. And when he was killed that way by the police, there was so much despondency and a sense of real despair at his loss, I just felt that we needed to do something. And mainly I felt that we needed to do something that would honor Dominique’s life and also his legacy and to think about his legacy. And do something that would also serve as a healing opportunity for the community of people who knew him and their friends and others who wanted to join. So I sent out, which I do in the middle of the night sometimes, an email to some of his friends and others, saying, “Hey, would people want to come together to think about reviving the concept of We Charge Genocide from 1951?” That We Charge Genocide petition was submitted by black activists, most of whom were affiliated with the Communist Party, so William Patterson and Robeson, and DuBois and Claudia Jones and other luminaries. And basically that petition listed out 150 racialized killings in the US, overwhelmingly police killings. And they wanted to take this petition to the United Nations. The US government went ballistic, they were very scared and worried and did

not want this petition to be filed, and they then took Paul Robeson’s passport— his passport had been revoked, he was supposed to go to Paris to the United Nations— so William Patterson took the petition and went to the UN. It turned out that when he got to Paris, all of the petitions that he had had been taken from his suitcase, had been destroyed. He’d been smart, and what he’d done was to mail himself some copies and so he had some, and he went to the United Nations. To this day the UN says that it never got that petition, that it was never filed, which is interesting. And if you know the history of this, the US Information Agency put out their own pamphlet called The Negro in American Life that was supposed to be a counter to this indictment of American racism and American anti-blackness. So I sent that out to folks at the end of May and said, “Do people want to get together and think about doing this, sending a delegation of young people of color to the United Nations to present a revised We Charge Genocide petition?” And people came together, a couple of weeks later we had a meeting in June 2014 at the Chicago Freedom School, which is another organization that I co-founded. And 50 people showed up, which was amazing— so many people were there, and there were all different kinds of people: young artists in the city, young organizers, older activists, lawyers, all sorts of people, who just wanted to come together to support the young people who had lost their friend, but also to make a statement about the nature of police violence against young people of color in Chicago, particularly young black people. So it was from that meeting, that initial gathering,

that we ended up deciding— I said at the meeting, very clearly to everybody there, that we didn’t have to do this, we didn’t have to send people to the UN, I was open, I wanted any other suggestions that people had of things that they thought would be useful and good, and if this wasn’t it, then what would it be? Everybody was unanimous about the fact that we should send folks to the UN, and people said we should also start Cop Watch again, because that had existed here in Chicago. So people were down for that, and people had other ideas of things that we could do together. So folks from We Charge Genocide wrote that report. It turned out very quickly— we didn’t know, but the UN Committee Against Torture meeting was going to be in November [2014]. We were in summer, we thought that we’d be going in the spring of 2015 to the Committee to End Racial Discrimination, but then the UN Committee Against Torture was that November. So we had only a few months to raise $15,000 to send young people. We initially wanted to send six, but we raised $20,000 and we ended up sending eight young people of color between the ages of 19 and 28 years old to go to the UN Committee Against Torture [in Geneva]. If you go to wechargegenocide.org you can find a summary of what happened on both days that they were there: the walkout that they engineered, the protest of standing silently with their fists up for 30 minutes, the amount of time that Rekia Boyd laid on the ground when she was killed by Dante Servin in 2012. So there was lots of symbolism. And what was pretty important for our group, was— before the delegation, everybody who had been before the UN before said, “Do not expect them to name Chicago specifically as a culprit in police violence and torture. Don’t expect Damo’s name to appear in any of the final documents or concluding remarks. You may or may not get them to ask one of the questions that you want them to ask of the State Department—and it turned out that those young people who went there were amazing. They lobbied individual members, they got so many of their questions asked at the proceedings. When you look at the concluding remarks, they specifically mention two names: Israel Hernandez from Miami Beach and Damo Franklin.

who have been wronged, survivors of violence that was law enforcementfocused violence. Chicago is the first municipality in history to ever pass a reparations bill for law enforcement violence. So that’s something that other cities are looking at for themselves now, as avenues for justice that are not personal and individual indictments of the police, not calls for cops to be jailed, you know, the same kind of language we hear over and over again out there on the streets in some cases. So that’s the long-short version of how We Charge Genocide came into being.

They specifically talked about Chicago and our police department, and called them out for torture and violence against young black people and young people of color, the only police department that was specifically named. And you know, Mike Brown’s parents from Ferguson had come to that same gathering and made their case on behalf of their son, and Mike Brown’s name doesn’t appear in the final minutes, nor does the Ferguson Police Department get specifically called out. It just shows the amount of work and energy that those young people put in when they got there, to push that. And from the time they returned, in November 2014, We Charge Genocide continues to organize protests, to support individual families, to do art projects and programs that bring the issue of policing and violence to the broader community, has co-facilitated and co-organized a huge 350 person conference last January called Watching the Watchers, and was one of the 14 organizations leading the Reparations Now campaign. So all these different pieces of work came out of just going to the United Nations.

I think the delegation brought back a lot of energy to the city. There was a report back in December of 2014 about the trip and it was packed, over 300 people showed up and there were more on the waiting list, to hear from the young people about the experience and what they thought. And one of the things that the concluding remarks of the UN Committee Against Torture also said was that Chicago should pass the reparations ordinance that had been introduced in the fall of 2013. And so, when the young people came back from Geneva, one of the things that we decided was to use the momentum of the UN support in their admonition to the city to pass the reparations ordinance, to give new momentum to that fight. And we were successful in May of this past year, to get the city to pass the reparations ordinance into law. Just this past week, 57 of the remaining survivors of Burge torture receive $100,000 checks, adding up to $5.5 million in restitution. That’s important, because those people— the statute of limitations had run out for them, and the city had no obligation to give them anything— and they were struggling, many of them. And the thing about the reparations ordinance that’s important is that it’s an abolitionist document, right? Because it’s a document that did not rely on the court, prison, and punishment system, to try to envision a more expansive view of justice. So while financial restitution was a part of that package, it also did a whole bunch of other things. Free community college education to the survivors, their kids and their grandkids. A public apology for the first time from the city about Burge torture. Provisions for a public memorial about the Burge torture cases. Housing support and employment support for the survivors. CPS will now have to teach about it, and people are working right now on a curriculum that will be taught about the Burge torture cases in eighth and tenth grade social studies classes from now on. So we asked for a whole series of things that we thought would be about rethinking justice for people

It’s really amazing work. Going back to some of the work done by Project NIA, I’ve seen a wonderful series of reports called Policing Chicago Public Schools, that give information on the criminalization of students in Chicago, and I think this is where I first heard the term, “school-to-prison pipeline.” Could you talk about some of the ways that we’re hurting students, especially our black students and students of color, by increasing the police presence in schools, and some of the ways that we could better serve them?

Sure. Basically, the definition of the school-to-prison pipeline is all of the different ways that young people, students, find themselves pushed out of school, and then more readily criminalized and sent into the criminal punishment system. There are many ways that manifests itself, there are many forces that lead to it, many institutional factors. One of those is excessive suspensions and expulsions. It is true that young people who are suspended from school are three times more likely to drop out than young people who are not, and this is out of school suspensions in particular. Young people who are expelled, they basically find it difficult to come back and find another school that will accept them, or they decide that they’re just done, they decide to drop out. And if we look at the numbers of people in prisons in Illinois who dropped out of high school, I think the number is like, over 50%. So there’s a connection there between education and incarceration in more ways than one. But the school-to-prison pipeline is also, high stakes testing, you know? All of the ways in which the new accountability regimes have come down on individual schools, individual teachers, individual students, to make the curriculum useless to people and not interesting, also causes young people to drop out and also kind of

feeds the pipeline to prison and criminalization in general. One of the things we did when we first started Project NIA— I mentioned to you before that we had envisioned these different ways that we could impact and create community— we had this peace room, which was at our local elementary school in the community. Initially we were there two-and-a-half days a week. I had a staff person who I hired whose job was to set that place up and be there, she was a licensed professional counselor who was trained in restorative practices. We trained community members to do peacemaking circles, and to go to that school and run that peace room, to be an alternative to suspension and expulsion for students within that particular school. So we were there with the notion that we would be there for two years, and we would kind of set up that space and train up teachers and build capacity in the administration, and then they would be able to run it themselves. What ended up happening was by the time we were leaving that school, at the end of our second year, we were there five days a week. And basically, the person I hired became an employee of that school. Which was not sustainable at all and was not the idea that we had. But the time that we were there we saw less suspension, less expulsion, less arrests of students, which was what we were hoping for. It was much harder to change the culture of punishment in the school— that’s a years-long process. So that was part of our work, was to try to figure that out. And one of the ways we were trying to figure out stuff around policing in schools was to do these reports that would let people know how many arrests were happening within our schools at CPS and to try to track through the years the decrease or increase of those. And those have dramatically decreased over the years, just as juvenile arrests in the city of Chicago in general have dramatically decreased, and arrests of youth across the nation have dramatically decreased over the past few years.

So the school-to-prison pipeline asks you to change the accountability regimes that are about testing, testing, testing. It asks you to not arrest kids in school. It asks you to limit and sparingly use suspensions and almost never to use expulsions. So that’s a little bit about that work. And for many years after we left that school we were still doing trainings for community members who could support schools or any other institutions in their neighborhoods, through our community-based peace room that we used to have on Clark Avenue in Rogers Park. So that’s a big part of the ongoing work that will need to continue. We were also conveners of a group of community groups that pressed CPS to finally make suspension and expulsion data public on their website. That was like a five-year battle, which we won a couple of years ago. So now you can actually go to the website and see for yourself, at the individual school level and in aggregate, about suspensions and expulsions. Transparency does help very much to give the community tools and information that they need to advocate for themselves and their kids around these issues.

I really loved the video, “A Wall is Just a Wall,” that you and Tom Callahan made to commemorate activists fighting police violence in 2015. Maybe it’s impossible to just choose one, but is there any moment or action that stands out to you as a highlight from last year in terms of something that you were really proud to be a part of?

I’ll cheat and say two. I’m incredibly— I still haven’t really processed the fact that we won on the reparations fight. I was one of the co-lead organizers of that campaign. I’ve been organizing for a very long time, almost 30 years now, and I have lost many more campaigns than I’ve won. But that one is really special for so many reasons. We stand on the shoulders of decades of work prior to that time and that moment. It was such an intense six months, a very focused campaign. So I spent most of the year, half the year, completely immersed in that struggle, that fight. So all of the actions and different kinds of things we did for that campaign will always stay with me as something very important and I think people have yet to be able to internalize what it’s meant. People who’ve struggled for that, we haven’t yet had a chance to process what it means. We just know that the survivors we fought beside and with, just feel so great about what happened and that we fought for them. All these— in this particular case— these old black men now, some of whom were tortured 35, 40 years ago when they were kids and teenagers, and are now senior citizens. To see that celebration party was incredibly poignant and really left me emotional. That’s one, and I think the second that I’d point to is the Sandra Bland actions that we co-organized with The Chicago Light Brigade. Because Sandra Bland, that case is so personal to me. I’m a black woman, and I drive around a lot, I have to get around to go to court with young people and do all sorts of other things. She is just like me, you know? I felt viscerally, when I saw that video of the way that police officer just completely obliterated her person. It was like, the violence of it felt so visceral and I just saw myself in that car. I’ve been in that position where the cops have stopped me for some random reason and I’m like, “Why are you stopping me?” And I know my personality, you know? How it’d be like, “Why do I have to not smoke? Why are you stopping me?” The questions and the indignation that she had, felt so real and visceral to me.

So when we had an opportunity here in Chicago— she’s from the Chicagoland area— to organize this action memorializing her, lifting her name in lights and saying her name, that was a really emotional action for me. We fought on so many levels for so many things, but personally, for myself, the Sandra Bland action really meant something very profound to me. I still think about her all the time and what must have been going through her mind in that jail cell. Whether or not they killed her with their hands is not the issue. They definitely killed her by putting her in that cell. And I just see myself in that space, like, what is going on here? So those are the two that stand out.

Thank you for that, and thanks again for talking with me. Do you have anything else you’d like to say before we go?

I think I’ll just say one thing that I think is super important currently in this moment that we’re in, what I think is a moment of promise and peril because we’ve got all of these new folks who really haven’t been in the streets for all the months and years before the Laquan MacDonald case. I think, I hope, it doesn’t get lost in all of this, the incredible leadership of the young black and brown people and their white co-strugglers who have fought really just on principle for all these months before that tape, that helped make the ground for what ended up happening with the release of that tape. I hope that their fight and their organizing and their struggle is not overshadowed. Because it’s not just young people of color, but young black people and young queer black people, who have been at the lead and at the forefront. And now that I see a lot of the old school, traditional, church people and politicians mugging for the cameras, I want people to remember

and I want that history to be properly recorded as to who has been in the streets, who has been out in the middle of the night in cold temperatures, post-Ferguson. Even before Ferguson, out here in Chicago people were fighting for Damo at the end of May 2014, as soon as he died. So we’ve been in the struggle, we’ve been in the streets. I say we because I give complete and utter credit to these young people. Older folks who’ve been mentors to some of these young people, and older organizers, without whom a lot of these wins could not have happened, have also been players in that struggle. So this is not solely a generational thing, it’s an ideological set of differences between who is included in the fight, who are we fighting for, how do we fight, what are the strategies and tactics that we use, and so what vision of the world do we want to be fighting for?

PREVENTING GUN VIOLENCE

By Kyle Gaffin

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARK WALSH The Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence is the oldest state organization working on gun violence prevention in the country. Currently in its 41st year, the organization was formed by four suburban women who thought the gun industry should be regulated like the automobile industry to help reduce the impact of gun violence on our communities. We sat down and spoke with Mark Walsh, ICHV’s campaign director on how that battle is proceeding. Walsh has been with ICHV for 6 years and working on the issue full-time for the past 8 years. He has long organized on political and social justice issues as well as working for various elected officials on the state and local level.

demic. Illinois requires licenses for all sorts of businesses in the interest of public health and safety – why not gun dealers? We’re also pushing for the titling of guns, in the same way that cars are titled, and limits on the number of guns an individual can purchase. We’re also working to make sure that mental health records are part of the system. We’ve been working on what’s called a “Lethal Violence Order of Protection,” which is basically where a family member or law enforcement could go to the courts and say, “We think this person is a risk to himself and other people, here’s the proof we have.” If the judge rules that that’s the case, the guns can be temporarily removed. And that’s important because what we’ve seen here in Illinois and nationally is that when a gun is close at hand, there’s more of a tendency for it to be used in the heat of the moment. Suicides, for example – your success rate with a gun is very high, it’s in the seventieth percentile, whereas pills, everything else is under ten percent. Very few people who attempt suicide and fail attempt it again. So if you are able to get that gun out of the house, you increase the chance that if someone does attempt suicide, they’ll survive and be able to get treatment.

I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about the issue of suicide and guns, because I think that’s an aspect of the gun violence problem that we don’t always consider.

Kyle Gaffin

Tell me a little bit about your organization. How does it seek to accomplish its mission?

Mark Walsh

We have basically two approaches to addressing the issue of gun violence in Illinois. One is through public education and the other is through public policy advocacy. With education, we publish materials to inform the public about the problem, we speak at conferences and on panels to increase people’s awareness of the law and guns. We also team up with schools to get kids engaged with this issue at a young age. We do this through our Student Voices Program. We just had our twentieth annual Student Voices Contest, where we

ask kids to submit essays, poetry and visual art all dealing with the issues of gun violence. Through our Activist Institute, we provide training in activism for students to get involved in the issue, educating them on the problem, and helping them to develop their own service projects and action campaigns to address this issue in their communities. We’ve also developed a curriculum for educators who want to help their students learn about gun violence and empower them to take action. We run anti-violence workshops as well.

And on the public policy front?

With public policy advocacy, we’re really pushing for common sense legislation. One thing we’ve been working on is the licensing and regulation of gun dealers, ‘cause they’re a huge source of

illegally trafficked guns. Currently, the federal licensing system offers very little oversight. Here’s an interesting fact: there are 738 McDonald’s in the state of Illinois. You know how many gun dealers there are? Over 2,500. Now, the vast majority of these are responsible dealers, but there are a few that are really irresponsible. In fact, about 20% of crime guns in Chicago can be traced to just four local dealers [Chuck’s Gun Shop, Riverdale, IL; Midwest Sporting Goods, Lyons, IL; Shore Galleries, Lincolnwood, IL; Westforth Sports, Gary, IN]. So we need better legislation to address these offenders. This means background checks on all employees, a security plan to prevent theft, a ban on alcohol on premise, a recording inventory where all sales are on record, and placement restrictions, so that a dealer may not be located in residential areas or near schools, that sort of thing. If you think about it, gun violence is really a public health epi-

There are approximately 1,000 gun deaths in the state of Illinois each year, with about 450-500 on average being in Chicago. I would venture to say that the majority of those are suicides. In Illinois, and this is also true of other states with large population centers, over 60% of gun deaths are suicides. In fact, this was my first encounter with gun violence. When I was in junior high, a friend of mine killed himself with his Dad’s service revolver after a party… you know, that easy access to a gun when you’re in that situation… and a twelve year old kid kills himself. And the devastation, I’ve worked with his family even twenty years later, still completely devastated by it. And we don’t talk about that so much, mental health is still a taboo subject in a lot of communities. I don’t think we talk about that enough. But the big problem here in Chicago is still homicides. The Superintendent may say, “Gun homicides are down,” but the number of shootings is up. Part of that is that we have better

medical care than we had ten years ago. But the problem isn’t really getting better. They’re still killing people. And one of the real problems I see is that we have an attitude in Chicago that this is somehow normal. You know, the reaction when a nine-year old gets lured into an alley and executed should be just mass outrage! Instead it’s a temporary boil up, and then we’re on to the next one, ‘cause it happens so frequently. It’s a crazy thing where you look at a paper on a Monday morning, and you think, “Oh, there were only twenty shootings and only three people died, that wasn’t a bad weekend.” I did a presentation before a group of college students through the State Department and Miami of Ohio, and it was a few kids from Miami of Ohio, but the other kids were from Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, and they were like, “What are you people doing?”

What are some other groups that you work with on this issue?

There are a lot of great groups that we work with. We work with about 35 active groups across the state and hundreds of people who want to see lives saved. Every day it seems like as the violence continues, we get a call or email saying, “How can I help?” There are a couple that help people deal with loss due to gun violence. What happens when you’re thrown into this system and your life is in complete chaos? One is called Chicago’s Citizens for Change [see interview with Joy McCormack in this issue] and Purpose over Pain, and they are all survivors who have navigated the system and are tr ying to help those who are entering it. There’s a group that started in Englewood called MASK (Mothers Against Senseless Killings), and what they did was just stake out a corner and take it over. They were out there every night in the summer and will be back out there in the spring. They said, “Hey, this is a hot corner, we’re going to take it over and feed people.” “Free Hugs and Free Food,” that’s kind of their motto. I was recently with a similar group, Parents for Peace & Justice, in Humboldt Park at Division and Keeler, a dangerous intersection. And it’s a completely different vibe when we were out there – kids were having a dance contest. These kids don’t come out at all, but they did then because there was this safe zone that was created.

Kind of a grassroots response, saying, “Hey, we’re just going to get together

and do something about this.” Is that right?

Yeah, and there’s a lot of that. You know, I’ve been known to say whenever there’s another shooting or something horrific happens, that the last thing we need is another group focused on this issue. I mean, it’s gotten a lot better over the years, but when I first started working on this, there was this attitude of, “You stay in your corner, I’ll stay in my corner, you do your thing, I’ll do my thing.” Now there’s a lot more collaboration. But there are a lot of people, and we need a lot of people, just saying, “We gotta do something.” Then there’s a group called Moms Demand Action, which was formed after the Sandy Hook shootings by mostly suburban moms who maybe aren’t directly impacted by gun violence, but who were able to see their own six- or seven-year olds as those victims. That’s a mantra of some people that I work with, that if you can picture someone you love as a victim of gun violence, you’re going to do something about it. And the fact is that it’s harder and harder to find a place that isn’t touched by gun violence.

The President said something following the recent shootings in Oregon, asking people to consider whether the organization that they think represents them, truly does represent their interests. Clearly he was referring to the NRA. What do you think people should know about the NRA and the gun lobby that they may not know?

I always tell this story from when I first started on this issue. I had this printer I had used for years, and one time when I’m picking up an order he says, “Mark, I don’t think I can do your printing anymore. I’m an NRA member.” I asked him, “Did you read what I printed?” So I went point-by-point with him through everything on the sheet, things like safe storage, universal background checks, an assault weapons ban, and he agreed with them all. I said, “Why don’t you send the $35 you give to the NRA to me, because I better represent you.” And you see that a lot. One thing I think we can be better about on the gun violence prevention side is not identifying everything as the NRA this, the NRA that, because it’s really the highest levels of the NRA that are the problem, those funded by the gun industry. The fact is that gun sales are shrinking, so the gun industry is trying to create and sustain a market, and they do that

by claiming that everything we do is the first step to taking everybody’s guns away. But when you talk to most people one-on-one about this stuff, things like safe storage, for example, it’s what they are already doing. They just get so jacked up thinking their rights are being taken away that it’s hard to have a conversation. The organization uses scare tactics to keep people from thinking carefully about this. What we really want is for people to see that, with things like licensing gun dealers, we really aren’t trying to take away anyone’s guns. We just want those dealers who are just bad community business partners to have to reform their practices.

You described this legislation earlier as “common sense gun legislation.” And that’s really what it is, right? It’s not about infringing on anyone’s Constitutional rights, it’s about finding basic, effective solutions to a massively destructive problem in this country.

Right. Now, there are many Constitutional scholars on both sides that constantly debate what the founders intended, but what’s important is that in the majority opinion for the Supreme Court’s decision in DC v. Heller, which overturned the DC handgun ban, Justice Scalia wrote that there is a fundamental right to keep and bear arms, but that does not mean that that right cannot be restricted. He goes on to say that he’s not sure what those restrictions are, but they probably include prohibited purchasers, for example. So it’s working out those restrictions while respecting some right to arms. And what we’ve seen in most circuit courts is that these common sense laws are routinely upheld. California has some of the best gun laws, has had the majority of them tested in court, and they’ve passed Constitutional muster. So if we can stop the thinking that we’re taking away a right, I would like to think that the debate could find some common ground and we could actually do something. But I’ve also sat in debates with the head of the State Rifle Association and lobbyists for the NRA who say they will never agree with us. Is that bluster? I don’t know, ‘cause I’ve had conversations with legislators who are decidedly not with us, yet who get that we need common ground but are so worried about the political ramifications that they don’t want to be the first one in. But hopefully we can find some middle ground to move forward.

Freedom of

A Conversation with Lillian Osborne

Protests on college campuses can present an image problem for college administrators—especially when the protests target unjust policies set by those administrations— and at Loyola University Chicago this has lead to policies that restrict demonstrations on campus. After reading an In These Times article by Branko Marcetic this past December about Loyola’s policies and the effects they have had on students demonstrating in solidarity with dining hall workers there, I asked Lillian Osborne, a senior at Loyola who is currently facing disciplinary charges related to a demonstration she helped organize, to speak with me. Lillian is involved with a student group called USpeak that is focused on abolishing Loyola’s demonstration policy. USpeak has aligned itself with Students for Worker Justice, a group that is pushing the university to adopt the Jesuit Just Employment Policy, which would guarantee campus workers a living wage and access to campus resources such as the library. As a part of her work with USpeak, she has organized against the demonstration policy. Although the university has put a moratorium on the policy pending revisions, Lillian and three of her classmates have been left with disciplinary charges over a demonstration they helped organize. A condensed transcript of our talk follows.

Dan Sloan

It seems like your organizing for free speech on campus has been necessitated in a way by your experiences organizing for other causes on campus. Could you talk about how Loyola’s demonstration policy has made it difficult for you and others to organize on campus?

Lillian Osborne

When I first got started organizing I was a freshman, and I was organizing around Aramark. We were trying to address student debt and rising fees at Loyola that were related to meal plans, and we wanted to hold a demonstration in the spring. We knew nothing about the policy, but one of our leaders who was a senior at the time was told by an administrator that if we held a demonstration, he or anyone else who was suspected of leading it could be suspended or expelled. So we read up on the policy and met with administrators, and I remember in a meeting I asked an administrator, “How can we trust that you’re going to approve this demonstration when effectively, we’re demonstrating against you, or criticizing the decisions that the administration has made?” And he said, “You just have to trust us.” He cited a series of demonstrations that happened in 2008 around racial profiling by Loyola PD and said, “This is why we have this policy.”

By Dan Sloan

And so a couple years later I started to get involved in Students for Justice in Palestine, and we were falsely accused of planning a demonstration at a Taglit Birthright table in our student center. It was Palestinian students who organized it, and they stood silently next to this Birthright table wearing signs that said, basically, “I can’t return to my homeland because I’m Palestinian,” and so critiquing the policies of Birthright that allow people with no connection to Palestine or Israel easy and free access there, like a vacation, when there are all these refugees and people who cannot return. SJP was charged with harassment, bias-motivated discrimination, disruption, and violating the demonstration policy. Ultimately we were punished for violating the demonstration policy and we lost funding for an entire semester—this was last spring—and meanwhile, the table that the students were protesting at was also unregistered, and so violating the same exact policy. The Exec board of SJP at the time was forced to undergo dialogue training while Hillel, the group that hosted the table, wasn’t subjected to any punishment at all. That has a lot of implications in terms of Palestine advocacy and civility and so forth, but that was really the second time that I had witnessed the use of the demonstration policy to punish students who were speaking out against unfair or unjust things happening at the university. And then this fall, students started to talk more about this. I was a part of leading events to educate students about the policy, because a lot of people weren’t aware of how restrictive it was. And there had also been a lot of changes to the policy to make it seem like it was more “free” but in reality making it more restrictive in some ways. Even radical activists who were part of SJP and had been punished by the demonstration policy saw the revisions that happened over last summer as positive changes, but we [in USpeak] started to speak out about what the policy really looked like.

We’re calling for the abolition of the policy in favor of a policy that would allow students to demonstrate where, when, and in whatever manner they want to. The administration has really pushed back against this. The organizers of the Mizzou solidarity demonstration [this past fall] were up against the demonstration policy also, until the university decided to drop it. But it continues to be a struggle because the administration wants to take these revisions out of the hands of students and faculty and people who are interested in having a more democratic decision-making process around the policy, and so they continue to push to revise the policy basically without our consent, and they’re not going to fulfill the changes that we want to see. It’s just going to be another round of changes that do not promote free speech on campus.

It’s hard for me to understand how the university can see a silent demonstration as harassment. It seems as though concerns over civility are sort of a catch-all to push back against any sort of dissent on campus. Toward that end, I wanted to ask about this more recent action on campus involving Aramark. Is that something you were involved in as well?

peak d

USpeak and Freedom of Speech on Campus

When we were in the process of planning that demonstration there were a lot of considerations we had to make because USpeak and Students for Worker Justice are affiliated with student government, and so we were able to reserve the “free speech zone” through that organization. It’s a little bit technical but the policy revision allows for this free speech zone on campus, which is really secluded, and there are other restrictions that say you can’t demonstrate during campuswide events and so forth. We wanted students to be able to hand Aramark manager’s demands on behalf of the workers and the students and faculty who are allying themselves with the workers. The workers are from the dining hall and they’re unionized with Unite Here, and they’re in contract negotiations and are asking for a living wage, protections for undocumented workers, and free healthcare. Aramark handed them this really awful contract proposal in November, so we mobilized to plan this demonstration. There were a lot of different accounts about what was going to happen with this delegation. We thought this might be five to fifteen people at most—it’s not going to be something that’s seen by a lot of people. And you know, during a union drive for example, when workers go in and deliver demands to their employer, their manager or whatever, which is a really powerful and symbolic act, usually it’s only a few people that go in. Like if you’ve

ever seen the Fight for 15 campaign, everybody stands outside while the workers deliver these demands. So our intent was not to have a huge delegation, we didn’t know that was going to happen. But students called for other students to come in alongside the people delivering these demands and so, probably— it’s hard to estimate how many students went, but— up to 60 students probably. They crowded in, and it was a very respectful thing but they the adjacent dining hall where an Aramark manager, Bill, was. And so the students created a circle and the three or four that delivered the demands said, “Bill, this is what we want. We want the workers to have a better contract,” and sort of pushed him, metaphorically, to answer why they couldn’t give them a better contract. And then the students filed out. This was very peaceful, Bill had plenty of space around him, but afterword administrators told our student government president, Michael Fasullo, who’s also involved in the organizing, that we should expect to be in conversation about this. We found out later that Bill had filed a complaint against us alleging that we broke the demonstration policy, that we disrupted the facility, and that we harassed him. And so the demonstration policy charge was dropped when the administration released a moratorium [on the policy] pending revisions.

But we’ve been officially charged— the four organizers including myself, and the student government— are charged with harassment and disruption.

So to clarify, the charges are now outside the context of the demonstration policy?

Yeah. So it’s interesting. Even though the disruption has to do with the fact that this was a demonstration, it’s still something that’s different from the demonstration policy.

That’s really wild. Huh.

That’s one way to put it. It’s sort of a technical thing, but this is why we’ve been connecting free speech and workers rights. I think in a more abstract way, workers rights obviously have to do with freedom of association and being able to support a petition in support of a union and we’ve seen that in connection with the adjunct professors who are organizing with SEIU now, and the fact that adjuncts are afraid to sign a petition and things like that. But also the fact that workers are not allowed to talk to students while they’re on the job and this is not a written policy, it’s a verbal policy. And so that made it much easier to connect the idea of free speech to the workers’ struggle because that’s where the workers get a lot of the meaning from their jobs, connecting with students. Some of them have been here at Loyola for decades, and have seen students grow up and have families of their own. And so connecting with the students is a really important aspect of the job for them, and recently managers have said, “You can’t talk to them,” especially as Students for Worker Justice has been visiting with them and connecting with them outside of the workplace and talking with them about their lives and getting to know what the workplace was really like for them. Despite having a union and so forth, students wanting to ally themselves with the workers became a threat to management.

I’m sure. So there’s currently this moratorium on the demonstration policy, but you mentioned that you’re not very optimistic about meaningful changes being made. Do you see this as just another round of changes in line with those that happened last summer, where it’s almost more of just a PR move, “We’ve listened to your input and here are the changes,” and yet you still need to keep your demonstrations in this one lawn of campus or whatever. You don’t feel that there will be any kind of meaningful progress made?

It must be a stress, to put it lightly— it’s been what, two and a half months at this point— and it’s just kind of hanging over your head, this vague threat of punishment.

We’re going to go to a hearing near the end of January, so in a couple of weeks here, and we’re busy strategizing and organizing around that to get a public campaign to pressure the university to drop the charges.

Yeah. Well, it’s not vague anymore. There are some sort of obscure parts to it, like, we don’t really know what it means for the student government to be charged with harassment and disruption. I mean, that’s unprecedented. I’ve never heard of a student government, an organization that’s supposed to be on a relatively equal footing with the administration, being potentially punished by the administration. Yeah, it’s been really hard. Like right now I’m working on a final paper that I had to get an extension on. Finals were done at the beginning of December and I had to get a lot of extensions and the other organizers did also. You know, in the middle of finals we’re facing a threat of charges, and trying to organize with people and informing people of what’s going on, and at the same time the administration was pushing through revisions of the policy and so we had to mobilize around that, so it’s been sort of fight-or-flight mode. And that’s been hard on me individually and hard on the other organizers as well, but it’s also hard to maintain a democratic structure in an organization. We’re new and we’re trying to establish a structure that works for two causes that haven’t been unified in the past. And at the same time we’re trying to make fast decisions. And so when everybody’s a full-time student and everybody’s in the middle of finals and decisions have to be made, it puts a lot of stress on people and it makes it very difficult.

Well, it depends on the way that progress is made. And it sort of puts us in a bind because it’s the question of representation. Like, what is real democratic representation or process on campus? Definitely if the administrators decide to revise the policy over winter break, which they wanted to, they would not create a policy that really has the interests of students and faculty and workers in mind. It’d be more about the image of the university. In the existing policy the second sentence is like, “The good name of the university is of the utmost concern here,” so we know exactly what the administration has in mind. It’s not really in their interest for students to be demonstrating and vocalizing dissent, and I think that’s important. When we think about free speech,

I think we’re taught to think about it as an individual right, as something that’s more social, an expression of what you wear or what you believe. But we’re seeing more and more how free speech is actually connected to very material realities and conditions.

Free speech isn’t just students going out and advocating for some distant, abstract, unpopular idea— it’s students calling for the university to treat workers better. And that means redistributing the resources of the university. When we think of that, it means no more administrative bloat. And at the same time as students are calling for divestment from corporations profiting off of the occupation of Palestine, that’s really unpopular to the administration and to the board of trustees. Because suddenly it means that students have democratic control over the funds of the university. Which is a huge threat to the profit motive.

And there’s no formal process for incorporating student input into this reformulation of the policy, is there?

That’s sort of what I was referring to in the representational bind that we’re in. So there are the endorsed mechanisms of decision making on campus, which is called the shared governance system: there’s the student government, which has about 30 to 40 student representatives on it, there’s the university, and then there’s the university senate, which has faculty and administrators and a couple of students on it. We’ve seen how the university has referred to these groups as basically advisory boards— they don’t have a real say in the policies of the university.

The s tudent government, we’ve seen in the past, has passed divestment. And the president of the university at the time, Father Michael Garanzini, released an open letter, which was unprecedented, which said, “It doesn’t matter what you passed. You don’t have any weight on the financial standing of the university. This is ineffectual and you, the student government, you don’t get to make decisions about how we spend our money.” And so we know that there’s a problem with what so-called legitimate forms of representations we have. We don’t have a lot of weight with the administration, we have more of a symbolic weight. The most effectual strategy that we have is basically media and protesting, demonstrating, organizing among ourselves and building policy. I want to make it clear that it’s not just protest, it’s the ability to unify students and have consensus around the issues and showing that to the administration. When you have a demonstration policy like the one that exists, it basically prohibits you from going straight to where decisions get made, which is the board of trustees. The policy says you can’t demonstrate on campus-wide events. It’s really vague and it allows the administration to say when you can or can’t demonstrate. And so one of those times could be when prospective students and parents are on campus, or when alumni are on campus, or when the board of trustees is in session. And so those kinds of events where you really do have the ability to connect with people who are stakeholders in the university who hold leverage— you can’t do that with the existing policy.

I’m sure that it’s hellish to deal with this bureaucracy, but I’m sure it’s at least a good education for an activist, right?

Yeah, there’s definitely education in hardship. I think struggle is the greatest way to connect with other people. It’s really important for building community and raising consciousness around an unjust structure, and the way the university really operates. These hardships, oftentimes people see them as failures, but I think it shows that we’re making progress and

we’re successfully pressuring the university to make changes. And Aramark feels that students allying with workers is a huge threat to worker exploitation. I think it’s really important that in these times we maintain a strong community in the sense that we continue to go through democratic processes. There’s a limit to how much fight or flight decision-making can happen. It’s important to continue to emphasize consensus and emphasize leadership, not just among a few people but also in a group of people. That’s the thing that I’m most concerned about, not just getting the charges dropped or whatever, or even the goals of abolishing the demonstration policy or for getting the Jesuit Just Employment Policy passed immediately. Our long-term goal is establishing a much more sustainable structure of activism and resistance at Loyola that goes beyond students who come and go. And that means building relationships with the people who really are the community, not just students but workers, faculty, professors. People who have an interest in resisting exploitation — and creating structures that really are democratic, as opposed to what the university has sold to us in student government and the university senate. Building the structures that we think are just and democratic, and building political relationships with people. It’s something that I’ve realized: I’m personally limited, burnout is real, and it’s hard to continue pushing, especially when a few of us have been doing this for a couple of years now. For me, going into this semester, it’s getting back to the root of why we do this: to build solidarity and a community that can continue to push for a more democratic institution.

BOO STING LITER ACY By Kyle Gaffin

An Interview With Noah Cruickshank

Literacy is undoubtedly one of the cornerstones of a free andflourishing society. As one of the foundational building blocks of any education, it is crucially important for the development of citizens who are critically-minded about their society and activelyengaged in its betterment. The need to cultivate reading skills is all the more pressing for our city, as the Chicago Literary Alliance reports that a shocking 53% of Chicagoans have “low or limited literacy levels.” Open Books is trying to change that. The non-profit operates used bookstores in the West Loop and Pilsen that help fund their literacy work throughout the city. I met with Noah Cruickshank, the group’s marketing manager, to learn more about this organization and discuss the place of books and bookstores in an increasingly computerized,digitized, and cyber-ized world.

Kyle Gaffin

I know Open Books as basically a used bookstore, but it’s so much more than that. What else does the Open Books operation encompass?

Noah Cruickshank

Yeah, calling Open Books a bookstore is typically the first obstacle we encounter, because our bookstores are the first point of contact for most people. But actually, first and foremost we are a literacy non-profit. The profits from our two stores and our online sales, every bit of money we make, goes right back into the larger nonprofit that they’re a part of.

What we do at Open Books, in a nutshell, is help kids learn to read. We do that in a couple of ways. One is our instructional programs. We have creative writing workshops and host field trips here. We see about four and a half dozen kids per year, and we work with them on many aspects of writing. We also have in-school programs. We have Open Books Buddies, where we take volunteers to schools twice a week for about half an hour to read with kids. Every “Big Buddy” has two “Little Buddies.” These are second and third graders, and they can range from those who need literacy intervention to those who are just looking for enrichment. We have another in-school program for middle and high school students called ReadThenWrite, where we work with kids to interpret a text and write a memoir in response. We try to pick books that accurately reflect who these kids are, so they’re reading about people that are like them, rather than characters that have no resemblance to their everyday life. At the end of the program we collect all their writings, publish them, and then host a book reading and signing for them. Lastly, we have a summer camp called Publishing Academy. We work with kids from conceiving all the way to publishing their first novels. At the end, we edit their work and then publish it as well. They get a fully finished book with a cover designed by an actual artist, totally copy-edited, with an author photo on the back and everything. We also do book grants. All the books you see here were donated to us – we collect about a million books a year. We keep the vast majority of them at our Pilsen warehouse, but a lot of books we collect, if they are high quality, we actually re-donate them. Our adult book grant program is typically for places like penitentiaries or nursing homes – if they need a library, we can provide them with books. We get so many copies of the same books that we don’t necessarily need them here, and this is the perfect way to give back

and make sure that people who aren’t able to purchase from our store will still have access to high quality and engaging books. And then with our kids book grant program we actually have a pretty incredible operation. If you are a teacher, we have an online form, it’s totally free, and you put in where you are, the age of your class, the reading level of your class, you can put the ethnic makeup of your class as well – you give us that information and then we handpick hundreds of books, box them up, and then you can either pick them up or, on occasion, we are able to drop them off.

This year we’ll give away about 125,000 books, across the entire city. And, due to demand, we actually now have two tables at our Pilsen location where, if you are an educator, you can come to the warehouse during regular hours and say, “Hey, I’m an educator, I’m here for your Book Grab table.” We’ll give you a box and you can go to these two tables, fill up that box full of books and leave free of charge. You only get one box per visit, but you can come back an unlimited number of times. But in this store every sale goes right to funding the instructional programs and those book grants as well. That’s really what this store is for.

How do kids get involved in these programs?

It depends on the program. For our workshops, the field trips that we run, that’s teacher-led. If a teacher is looking for a place to take his or her kids for a morning session to get them interested in writing or literacy and they find

out about us, they come to us. When it comes to our in-school programs, our Reading Buddies and ReadThenWrite, we do a lot more outreach and working with schools, as the schools have to accept us and give us some log time. So we work with teachers whose classes we would be “pushing into, ” as well as the administration to make sure that’s all hunky-dory. And then with the Publishing Academy, that’s entirely kidand parent-based. So it depends on what they want, but the majority of it is through teachers.

When and how did Open Books start?

We just passed our ninth birthday last May, and we were founded by Stacy Ratner. She had done a lot of work in the tech sector, but got kind of tired of working in a strictly commercial enterprise. She firmly believes that after clothing, food, and housing, literacy is a fundamental human right. She founded this in her basement, I believe, and after getting off the ground, we started hosting field trips out of our first offices in River North – we didn’t have a store then yet. After a few years in River North, we opened a store, got a warehouse, which we moved to our Pilsen location, and we did our online sales from there. And people kept coming in to donate books and would ask, “Hey, do you sell books here?”, and we thought, “Why don’t we start a store here?” So we started the Pilsen store. But it began as one woman’s idea and it’s grown exponentially from there.

10 Non-Profits You Should Know About

It seems like our world is becoming more and more digital. What does that mean for bookstores, and what would you say to somebody who questions the value of books and bookstores, especially when there’s an increasing amount of technology being introduced into schools to help facilitate education?

(but probably don’t…yet)

Open Books is part of the Literacenter – what does the Literacenter do, and how is it distinct from Open Books?

The Literacenter is basically a shared working space. It’s the first of its kind for literacy non-profits in North America. Basically the idea was to bring a bunch of different people together so that a kind of cross-pollination would happen. The Literacenter is technically run by the Chicago Literacy Alliance, an umbrella organization – Open Books is a member, and there are eighty members of the literacy alliance, fifty of which are members of the Literacenter. This ranges from us, who are anchor tenants with all this space, to some who maybe use it once a month when they need a space to work. There are nine non-profits upstairs that have full-time offices, but then there are another forty that come in depending on what they need. The non-profits upstairs, they’re all literacy-focused, but the differences are vast – there are adult literacy programs, there are folks that work entirely with teacher training, there are folks that work primarily on the student side, there are folks that work entirely with Pre-K, there are folks that work entirely with high school students. It really runs the gamut. It’s great for us, ‘cause our book grants are for both kids and adults, and our instructional programming runs from second through twelfth grades, so there are many points of resonance with others working here. The fun part about that is that nothing is necessarily clear, because we’re just discovering how we can collaborate. It’s exciting, there’s a lot of potential and we’re in a really cool space.

There are a couple things that we think about a lot. I think people can have the misconception that because we probably are over-reliant on digital technology now, that that means there isn’t some good that it does in terms of things like education. I think for us here our thought is, “If it’s productive, if it helps kids learn, then that’s great, that’s exactly what we should be doing.”

So we’re not necessarily against technology, and no one should be against real innovation. But when it comes to books and reading, more and more studies show that in terms of having a healthy child, literacy is key, even under the age of five. If kids are anywhere close to being able to read, you should be reading to them, because being read to stimulates the brain. Reading to children and focusing on literacy is sort of “doctor-proven” to be essential for them to be happy, healthy, productive, for them to be the best they can be. And you’re still never going to have the same sort of interaction with screens as you have with books. There’s nothing wrong with Kindles and all that, but the tactile nature of books is a different experience,

especially for kids. It’s a different experience for adults as well, but for children specifically, being able to touch and interact with a book as a physical object has an impact, and studies show it’s very different than that of a screen. So books are ultimately very important in that way. And then, with a bookstore you have the ability to interact with people who really know what they’re talking about. Our bookstore team thinks really hard about what goes on the shelves. “What is going to impact our community? What books are they going to find interesting? What books are going to engage their love of reading?” Sure, there are great lists online about what to read, and Amazon has an algorithm, and there’s nothing wrong with all that. But there’s also word of mouth, learning from an expert, and getting recommendations – those are really the best ways to find anything. Having a space where you can physically look at the books and then talk to another human being is still very important. Even in the digital age, with algorithms and everything, there is still something to be said for that serendipitous experience of having a book “fall into your lap” or having someone recommend it to you. I think we all still want that in our lives, as opposed to having everything dictated to us. We also provide a community space. This is why libraries are also great, to provide spaces to cultivate literacy outside the home. You can find a community space where you can meet like-minded readers, and we host author launches, musicians, and performers here. We’re not just a box where books happen to be – we are a thriving community space. It’s much more than just come in, talk to someone, get a book, it’s also that we support the artistic community in Chicago and are supported by its artistic community. I think it’s self-evidently important that the arts need to thrive, and bookstores are one place where that happens. They are places of culture throughout the city.

So you don’t think bookstores are going the way of the dodo?

You know, we pay attention to all the trade magazines and stuff like that about bookstores, and after a pretty bad decade – bad couple decades really, ever since the big box stores got really huge – independent bookstores are not in a terrible place. The prevailing story for the longest time has been this kind of a “clutching of pearls,” saying, “the bookstore is going to die.” I think that’s probably true for the big box stores – Borders is gone, Barnes & Noble has a pretty odd way of functioning. But independent bookstores, the ones that have survived the recession and the big box store period, are consistently doing better and more bookstores are opening up. There have been a couple in the city that have recently opened up, and I don’t think there was a bookstore in the West Loop ‘til we showed up. People are coming, people are interested. There is a way that bookstores as a community space are still appealing to people after all this time. I would be lying if I said everything was amazing for all bookstores everywhere, there are plenty of places that closed down because of rent or lack of sales. But if there are new ones opening up and there are others that are expanding, it can’t be as dire as it’s been made out to be in the larger media narrative about independent stores in general, right? I mean, we heard the same thing about record shops, and as it turns out, vinyl has become this great specialty that people invest a lot of time and money into. I wouldn’t have guessed that in 2001. And it’s the same thing with books. I think it’s not as dire as it seems.

Environmental Law & Policy Center

Streetsblog Chicago

Albany Park Community Center

Girl Forward

Since 2006, Streetsblog has covered the movement to transform our cities by reducing dependence on private automobiles and improving conditions for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit riders. We publish a wide-ranging, daily news source where Chicagoans can plug in to efforts to make their streets more livable. There’s a long way to go to re-orient Chicago’s streets toward effective transit and safe walking and biking, and getting from here to there won’t be simple or quick. Streetsblog helps map the route.

UCAN

UCAN strives to build strong youth and families through compassionate healing, education and empowerment. Youth who have suffered trauma can become our future leaders.

Forefront

ELPC advances environmental progress and economic development together in the Midwest and nationally. We put this mission to practice by advancing clean energy, clean air, clean water and clean transportation through strategic, multi-disciplinary legal, policy, finance, science and media advocacy.

03 Fresh Taste Fresh Taste is an initiative by thirteen Chicago-region foundations working together to relocalize the Chicago foodshed and improve equity of access to good food. By “good food” we mean food that: promotes responsible land and water stewardship; provides fair value to all of those working throughout the production and distribution system; is reasonably affordable; and promotes health.

Forefront builds a vibrant social impact sector for all the people of Illinois. Founded in 1974, we are the nation’s only statewide membership association for nonprofits, philanthropy, public agencies, advisors, and our allies. We provide education, advocacy, thought leadership, and project management to attract investment to the sector, develop top talent, improve systems and policies, and build organizational capacity.

Compiled by Charlie Festa

APCC educates and supports members of the community as they determine their own path of growth and development by providing diverse programs and services for individuals, families, groups, and businesses.

GirlForward provides adolescent refugee girls with individual mentorship, educational programs and leadership opportunities, creating a community of support that serves as a resource and empowers girls to be strong, confident and independent.

Peterson Garden Project

BUILD, Inc.

Peterson Garden Project is a plot-toplate resource organization dedicated to teaching everyone to grow and cook their own food. (Everyone. Seriously.) Peterson Garden Project’s 8 urban gardens and community cooking school address key issues of nutrition and community including accessibility of healthy foods and scarce green infrastructure.

In 1969, BUILD (Broader Urban Involvement & Leadership Development) started out as a gang intervention program serving fewer than 200 gangaffiliated youth and now serves over 3,000 youth annually. BUILD offers targeted services to enhance our impact in four priority communities - Austin, East Garfield Park, Humboldt Park and Logan Square - while continuing to provide support in other Chicago neighborhoods and throughout Cook County. BUILD’s mission is to engage at-risk youth in the schools and on the streets, so they can realize their educational and career potential and contribute to the stability, safety and well being of our communities.

08 National Veterans Art Museum

The National Veterans Art Museum inspires greater understanding of the real impact of war with a focus on Vietnam. The museum collects, preserves and exhibits art inspired by combat and created by veterans. As a nonprofit institution, the National Veterans Art Museum relies heavily on monetary and in-kind donations to accomplish its mission of inspiring a greater understanding of the real impact of war.

L I S T E N

Chicago Activism Network Black Youth Project 100 Web: byp100.org Twitter: @BYP_100 chicagochapter@byp100.org Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100) is an activist member-based organization of Black 18-35 year olds, dedicated to creating justice and freedom for all Black people. We do this through building a collective focused on transformative leadership development, direct action organizing, advocacy and education.

#LetUsBreath Collective Web: letusbreathecollective.com Twitter: @LetUsBreathe773 #LetUsBreathe Collective aims to harness creative capital and cultural production to deconstruct systemic injustice in America and worldwide. A grassroots alliance of artists, journalists, and activists, we use our talents to amplify marginalized voices, disrupt the status quo, offer opportunities for healing and education, and provoke critical thought and dialogue about the intersections of oppression through film, music, theater, poetry, and civil disobedience.

Assata's Daughters Web: assatasdaughters.org

of Chicago who love and support each other. We come together under the shared respect, love, and power of Assata Shakur as Black feminists and organizers. Our program seeks to create and hold space for dialogue, affirmation, and the exploration of the different forms of Black women’s empowerment and self-determination.We help connect our members to the current Black Lives Matter movement and support their presence and participation in those spaces and events, including rallies, marches, actions, panels, and more.

Black Lives Matter - Chicago Chapter Web: blacklivesmatterchicago.tumblr.com

Twitter: @BLMChi BlackLivesMatterChicago@gmail.com This group is one of *many* iterations of #BlackLivesMatter: a movement, a rebellion, an affirmation, an intervention… and so much more. Like so many, we have been activated to participate in the Freedom Rides and Calls to Action transmitted globally by the Ferguson community in the wake of the killing of Mike Brown. We are honored to be active with central organizers in Ferguson as participants in the national Action Team of Ferguson October. Our priorities here are to amplify our collective knowledge and applied practices toward abolishing anti-Blackness, and to honor the organizing and mobilization put forth by various Chicago based organizations, collectives, projects and individuals within the expansive, intersectional Black Lives Matter network.

Project NIA Web: project-nia.org Twitter: @projectnia Launched in 2009, Project NIA is an advocacy, organizing, popular education, research, and capacity-building center with the long-term goal of ending youth incarceration. We believe that several simultaneous approaches are necessary in order to develop and sustain community-based alternatives to the system of policing and incarceration. Our mission is to dramatically reduce the reliance on arrest, detention, and incarceration for addressing youth crime and to instead promote the use of restorative and transformative practices, a concept that relies on community-based alternatives.

• To empower diverse communit y members to take leadership in addressing issues faced by youth impacted by the juvenile justice system. • To develop effective communitybased (rather than criminal legal) means of accountability for violence and crime – using a restorative and transformational justice approach. • To eradicate youth incarceration.

Chicago Freedom School Web: chicagofreedomschool.org Twitter: @ChiFreeSchool

Twitter: @AssataDaughters Founded in 2007, the mission of the Chicago Freedom School (CFS) is to create new generations of critical and

Assata's Daughters is a grassroots, intergenerational collective of radical Black women located in the city

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independent thinking young people who use their unique experiences and power to create a just world. CFS provides training and education opportunities for youth and adult allies to develop leadership skills through the lens of civic action and through the study of the history of social movements and their leaders. Our vision is in the spirit of the original freedom schools in Mississippi in the 1960s, with CFS serving as a catalyst for young people across Chicago to discover their own power to make change – not only for themselves, but also for their communities and the world.

Lifted Voices Twitter: @LiftedVoices

Project NIA facilitates the creation of community-focused responses to youth violence and crime. Our goals are:

WLPN 105.5FM CHICAGO

Web: liftedvoices.org Lifted Voices is an action oriented organization aimed at defending the lives and rights of women and non binary people of color. Through direct action, community dialogue and self defense curriculums, we seek to empower and protect ourselves, and one another.

INCITE! Twitter: @incitenews INCITE! is a nation-wide network of radical feminists of color working to end violence against women, gender non-conforming, and trans people of color, and our communities. We support each other through direct action, critical dialogue, and grassroots organizing.

INFO

W H A T ?

W L P N

1 0 5 . 5 F M

FOR REAL INFORMATION EMAIL INFO@LUMPENRADIO.COM AND ASK FOR LOGAN BAY

Dear Readers, You are reading these words, upright in that plump little velvet armchair of yours. You are reading these words eating a large burrito on a wooden bench. Or, more likely, you are luxuriating in a mound of urine, feces, and vomit soaked Lumpens, Readers, and Poetry Mags, respectively, with your reading spectacles on, reading yourself for the remorseless spectacle of PROFESSIONAL BROADCASTERS UPDATE. My message must have traveled safely if you are reading this; slipping out of the confines of my American Tower Masters ™ brand prison, making its way to the hands of the Lumpen global blimp service, traveling down one of the remaining pneumatic underground pipelines installed by Chairman Thar during the “infrastructure development phase” of his “beautiful tenure as demigod and American Hero” of the Boring Theoretical Party in the 90s, and finally, carried a some ungodly length of snowy miles by a herd of blind Bridgeport street orphans, to the soft and delicate hands of our boy-wonder editor Kyle. I’m writing to you because I’ve been seeing quite a few smoke signaled questions in the many long hours I spend gazing out the window of this American Tower Masters™ prison, somewhere high in the Illinois Alps, and the content of most of these questions has been in regards to WLPN 105.5 Chicago, nee’ Lumpen Radio, e.g., “Chicago’s Nightmare”, i.e. “Chicago’s Only Home for KrautHouse and Techno MoodWave Ambient Crust Noise and Community News”. I cannot answer your Smokey questions in person because I must remain in this tower as collateral as per a clause in our antenna rental contact with American Tower Masters ™. I can only assume this clause, which was negotiated on behalf of Lumpen by our Mafioso broadcast engineer, Peter Female, is part of some “larger plan”, and that my suffering and imprisonment, as well as the delay of our broadcast signal launch, have a reason. I comfort myself with these thoughts when my mind returns to the vision of EdMar signing the contract as he downs an artisan craft ale and uproariously belly laughs, the American Tower Master™ goons emerging from the shadows to bind my hands with coaxial cable and lead me out the door. It appears that I will have to remain in this tower, and that we will not go on-air until EdMar files the proper City of Chicago permit. The city permit filing must include secret documents from the Ancient bureaucratic underbelly of American Tower Masters ™. These documents are locked with me in the glass prison. I will not be released, or able to deliver the papers until the city permit is filed. So, as you can see, the circular bureaucratic predicament I am held hostage to doesn’t have a clear end. Since this may take awhile, I am writing to answer your smoke queries because they are disturbing my view of infinite nothingness, and although I appreciate the attention, you are only serving to remind me of how alone I am. Despite my grave peril, neither of Bridgeport’s finest, my “boss” and “sworn leader”, the loathsome and gleeful EdMar, norm traitorous and phlegmatic coworker Logan, have come to see me during glass tower ™ visiting hours, which are unfortunately from 6-8 AM, when EdMar is asleep and Logan tends to spend the time grooming his tail fur. So here are your answers, smoke-signalers.

STREAMING DAILY ON THE WEB UNTIL WE HAVE A TOWER AT LUMPENRADIO.COM

PROFESSIONAL BROADCASTERS UPDATE

C H I C A G O

YOU HAVE A RADIO STATION? YOU MEAN YOU ARE STARTING A PODCAST? I MUST HAVE HEARD YOU WRONG. Yes we have a radio station. We will be transmitting shortly on the airwaves at 105.5 FM in Chicago. No, that’s not a metaphor or a podcast.

WHAT IS FM RADIO?

Remember that thing that plays commercials, Bob Seeger, and leftist War propaganda in your parent’s car when you turn that little knob? Yeah that is radio. Or that is what was before we came along. FM radio goes from 87.8–107.9 MHz (Mutinous Horrible Zsounds.)

WAIT, WHAT IS RADIO?

Radio, or electromagnetic waves, has been around since the beginning of time, or at least the big bang. We can hear the sounds of galaxies merging through radio waves. Licensed FM radio in American has progressively become a place for corporate monopolies and religious entities to promote their commercialist viewpoints, with bright spots of hope and community empowerment here and there. FM radio as we know it now was invented by various men who were eventually driven into obscurity and death by corporate lawyers stealing their ideas.

WAIT, SO YOU HAVE A STATION LIKE WGN OR Q101 HOT JAMS? DID YOU BUY THAT? YOU MUST BE RICH LIKE QUADDAFI!

Well, no, the Public Media Institute, a small nonprofit, AND dare I say, DIY, cultural space in Bridgeport did not suddenly find millions of dollars for a license; we got it for free from the FCC! Except for the $100,000 plus in equipment, permits, construction, building space, tower rent that we’ve been paying with the support of the community and selling Logan’s tail plasma.

L U M P E N R A D I O . C O M

WAIT, YOU WERE “GIVEN” A RADIO STATION? CAN I HAVE ONE?

In October 2013, there was a “once in a lifetime” application window where nonprofit educational groups, tribal organizations, schools, pubic safety groups, and churches (zoinks) could apply for “newly available” Low-Powered FM frequencies. The last time this happened was in 2003 (?) and most people say it won’t happen again “in our lifetimes.” So no! The big reason we were on this inside tip was because Mysterious Radio Hero, Todd Urick, from the grassroots non-profit Common Frequency (www.commonfrequency) contacted us via carrier pigeon back in the summer of ’13 if to see if “Co-Prosperity Place” was interested in applying for one of the last FM radio channels in the US. After a series of secret meetings with Google Search and blessings by our Undertown Overlords I then brazenly spent time at my AmeriCorps job making calls on company time to the FCC & and Todd who helped us fill out the application. About a year later, we were given a construction permit.

I THOUGHT THE GOVERNMENT SUCKED, WHY WOULD THEY GIVE SUCH COOL PEOPLE LIKE YOU A RADIO STATION??

After about 5 years of trying, Congress passed the Local Community Radio Act of 2010 which made it so Low Power FM stations, could be within 2 spots on the radio dial from other commercial or “full power” stations. So we could now be on 105.5 FM even though someone is on 105.9. Some say that passing this law was just a token concession to deter illegal microbroadcasters and pirate radioers from continuing their 90s tomfoolery, and that it was to distract from the massive power that corporate conglomerates still have over the airwaves since the regulatory rollbacks of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. But, groups such as the National Association of Broadcasters and even noncommercial NPR stations fought tooth and nail against allowing LPFM’s on the air. So, even if the law

L I S T E N

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was a concession, the powers that be and their neo-liberal pawns in the Commie Public Media Industry are still running scared with the potentiality of 1000’s of low power stations opening across the US. We also were granted the station because Public Media Institute (Lumpen’s adopted grandmother) is a longtime nonprofit organization with proven cultural programming in Chicago, we have also agreed to keep the station dedicated to the community, to accept no advertising money (although we can accept underwriting), and to provide educational programming.

SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO PLAY?

You could have googled this question instead of going through the trouble of smoke signaling, but our goal is to “showcase innovative ideas, play highly curated music, and broadcast on the issues of our day. “ What does that mean? We have the freshest vinyl DJs on the planet, we are providing a space for community groups and organization to amplify their messages, local journalism, wrestling, magic, we have Tibetan gongs, sound art, and hell, why don’t you just look at the schedule that is printed here in the magazine.

CAN I GET INVOLVED?

Yes. If you haven’t already please smoke signal me your email address or reach us at info@lumpenradio.com.

SO WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GET ON-AIR?

When I get out of this tower.

Yes.

IS THIS THE COOLEST THING EVER? WHAT ARE YOU WEARING?

Coaxial cable and silk.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE PART OF LOGAN’S TAIL?

The Top of it.

LOW POWER RADIO SEATTLE NEWS

HOW DO WE GET YOU OUT OF THERE? Just kidding, you’re never getting out! Leave me alone Ed. Or try to extend the tube system to fit a human body.

Editor’s note: And well, this is where the Alderman’s pitiful hostage and/or Professional Broadcaster’s column was cut off. I have the final page, which surely sums up everything that came before it with profound elegance and humble, heartwarming sentiments, but unfortunately our copy is covered in American Tower Masters ™ brand fire ants, so it’s time to move along to the next article. The station seems to be coming along very nicely though, don’t you think?

WHAT IS LUMPEN RADIO LUMPEN RADIO (WLPN) IS A NON COMMERCIAL RADICAL RADIO STATION FROM CHICAGO (ON 105.5 FM) THAT SHOWCASES INNOVATIVE IDEAS, PLAYS HIGHLY CURATED MUSIC, AND BROADCASTS COMMENTARY ON THE ISSUES OF OUR DAY. WLPN SPOTLIGHTS THE HIDDEN PARTS OF THE CITY WE LOVE, AMPLIFYING ITS VOICES AND SOUNDS.

In the Fall of 2013, almost 3,000 groups applied for low-power FM (LPFM) licenses from the Federal Communications Commission. These will be on the FM dial and will be able to reach three and a half miles. Non profits, student groups at universities with full power stations, faith based organizations, tribal governments, and public agencies were eligible to apply. Groups have 18 months to prove to the FCC that they can get on the air. They are also able to get 18 month extensions just in case they run into snags. In 2015, 524 got on the air and there are still 1030 with valid construction permits and about 100 applications that haven't been processed yet according to Radio Survivor. Out in Seattle we're building seven new stations that will blanket 90% of the city when they all get on the air in the next couple years. You can hear a couple of them that already broadcast online: K XSU at Seattle University [kxsuseattle.wordpress. com/] and Hollow Earth Radio [http:// www.hollowearthradio.org/]. At Hollow Earth, roughly 50 volunteers from the neighborhood make audio happen every month online. On the last Sunday in January, I talked with 40 of them in a Mason's Hall basement in Seattle's Central District. They were doing an anti-oppression training. They get that LPFM is an opportunity to structurally shift the way community media is done. They want to work on making it more inclusive, and part of that starts with

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making their mostly white DIY culture space a place where more people feel welcome. Other applicants in Seattle haven't created much of a space of any kind yet. They are new organizations where their main dynamic right now is transitioning from small groups of people who applied for their permits to ones where more people can plug-in. As a group we're figuring out how to share knowledge and other resources. We've done a couple events at the Central Branch of The Seattle Public Library to show how community media and libraries are a good fit. We have all-city work groups for the various components of building stations engineering, digital, fundraising, emergency response... and that's just the start. Soon we'll start workshops for audio producers. Folks are jumping at the chance to make content. One of the stations, Rainier Valley Radio put out a call for program proposals and got over 50. Apparently a couple dozen are "shovel ready" and could be podcasts right now. Imagine seven neighborhood radio station anchor points for a mosquito fleet of podcasters before they even get on the air. They will be a new layer to the already flourishing public media ecosystem in Seattle that's shifting and consolidating. I can't wait to see where we go next.

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GO FUND HIM: JOE FRANK MEDICAL AND RECOVERY FUND OPEN LETTER TO ALL “RADIO FANS” OR “FANS OF GOOD THINGS"

JOE FRANK IS A RADIO ARTIST OF TRANSCENDENT GENIUS. IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHO HE IS, BUT PURPORT TO ENJOY ART, THEN YOU ARE MISSING OUT, AND A LIAR, BECAUSE YOU HAVEN’T TRULY ENJOYED ART IF YOU HAVEN’T HEARD JOE FRANK. LISTEN FOR HIM ON WBEZ SUNDAY NIGHTS AT 11. OR ON YOUR LOCAL CHANNEL. OR BETTER YET, BUY A SUBSCRIPTION TO HIS FULL LIBRARY OF PROGRAMS FOR A MEASLY 29.99 A QUARTER AT JOEFRANK.COM. If you DO know who he is, please go to this website and donate money!! The website will explain everything!! https://www.gofundme.com/joefrank If you have illegally downloaded his programs, you better donate double! As with all art that is greater than a single human genius should have been able to create, Joe Frank’s work is better listened to than described because your mind’s conjurings will only be puny in comparison to the blazing glory of Joe Frank. Surrealism, humor, fiction, nonfiction, jazz loops, illegal

recordings, sex, old world Jewish sensibility, and violence are all rolled into his pieces. Ira Glass and Jonathan Goldstein, preeminent “artsy” radio makers both stole their swag from or studied under Joe. He is incomparable. I have been af flicted with Stendhal syndrome from a young age. Stendhal syndrome is basically when you cry or faint, hallucinate, and get palpitations, over scenes of beauty or great works of art. It is known to happen in the Swiss Alps, and it happens to me when I listen to Joe’s work.

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would think. So, I also donated money, and let me tell you, I donated more than some people. And sent weird letters that resembled ransom notes to Joe. So I wept and slept with a picture of Joe under my pillow. And I realized that Joe Frank’s work is so good that it is a literal reason to be alive. I realized I felt purified in his genius. I felt purified in my love for it. I loved myself in my love for him. And I realized that I was realizing realizations that sound almost exactly like I think people have with literal Jesus—purification, bliss, love, a reason to exist? In October I bought a ticket to LA, cash flow be damned, because Joe announced he was doing a live show. I’d rather be destitute than miss Joe. Unfortunately the show was called off because Joe had been in the hospital. But I went to LA anyway hoping I would be able to find Joe by triangulating his PO box and beg him to take me on as his apprentice. I would sit on his lawn for

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following the earlier metaphor, I had received the sacred stigmata, which in this case was puking. If I couldn’t find him, I would become him! For although there are male Joe Frank acolytes and copycats, I do not know of any female ones. It is a shame that Joe Frank has given so few interviews so far. It is a shame that there are not multiple academic works already written analyzing the exact method and manner of his genius. It is a shame that there is not already a “Joe Frank School of Radio”, in the literal, and academic categorization sense. It is a shame that this person who has created works that allow us to transcend our lives, has faced any financial fear when it comes to keeping himself alive. It’s a shame that the medical industrial complex is such bullshit. It is shame that I have seen no major pushes from the NPR stations that carry his content to fundraise on his behalf, and it is a shame that they may not have compensated him adequately to begin with, instead spending the money on ornate pizza parties and infographics. It is a shame that I will have to start the Joe Frank Fan Club & Wellness Foundation because no one else already has. It’s only a shame because my greatest fundraising idea is to make Joe into an Internet cam girl, where he answers questions about his editing process in exchange for digital hundred dollar bills tucked into his digital G-string. But we need Joe. I need Joe. And he is not leaving us.

Joe Frank has also given me another reason to cry. On January 9th I was emailed that Joe had been struck down by illness of such severity, and with enough bullshit financial implications that his wife and him had to seek outside support. Aided by an incoming monthly hormonal influx, I began weeping any time I thought about Joe or got an update from his “gofundme” site. I wept for weeks and began storing these tears in a clear plastic box in an attempt to collect what I believed might be some sort of healing cure— the tears of a young virgin girl with a pure heart. Or the tears of a girl who has only had two monogamous semilonger term boyfriends, with a pure heart. I genuinely thought this would work but it’s actually harder to harvest, store, and ship tears that you

1000 years until he answered my single question, like a character seeking enlightenment in the Bahagavad Gita. I perversely facebook messaged him asking if he could meet up for a juice date, even though I knew he had been sick, and he replied that he didn’t meet up with listeners any longer. After that, I was immediately struck down with an origin-less illness, and I lay, for many days, recording myself puking on the tile floor of my uncle and aunt's bathroom, swearing that I would find Joe Frank. My only pukely foray into the outside world on the trip was to a beach by Santa Monica, which I believe is somewhere just south of his home. I realized, as the salty beach waves restored my vigor that I had fallen ill because I was taken on Joe Frank’s sickness through psychic empathy. Or

So listen! www.joefrank.com A n d

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M O N D A Y S Western Automatic Music with Chad and Mike Airs: Every Monday from 12-2pm Western Automatic Music hears the phantom sounds that hang in the air from the ghosts of bright red radios, all the hits from all the charts, they pass our corner and linger in the air mixing with the tinny reverb funneled thru small burnt transistors... Western Automatic Music is the sound of sinners all over the world falling to their knees. Western Automatic Music is like Chicago itself: huge, filthy, and mean.

General Anesthesia with DJ Nolan

gofundme.com/ joefrank Nothing you can spend your money on could be more valuable.

Out of Vogue with Ian Wise, Alice and Chris

A mishmash of freaky sounds to warp your brain!

A talk show with guests hailing from the worlds of food, music, art, social change and politics. Not necessarily in that order.

The Ponderers with Sandra Trevino & Stephanie Manriquez

Airs: 2nd & 4th Mondays from 4-6pm Beats and vibes from the past, present, and future. bibliokleptomania.tumblr.com

Radius PATCH Series

@radiobridgeport facebook.com/radiobridgeport/

Airs: 2nd & 4th Mondays 6-8pm

Airs: 2nd Mondays 11pm-12am

The Ponderers explore female-fronted alternative sounds from around the globe. Featured guest interviews highlight music, art and culture.

Short show Bio: Radius PATCH is a program of curated playlists selected from the Radius Episode archive. Each playlist is organized around a specific topic or theme that engages the tonal and public spaces of the electromagnetic spectrum

@theponderers Gozamos.com/theponderers

Post Modern Talking with Bobby Conn and DJ LeDeuce Every Monday 8-10PM Tune in and hear what happens when our culture implodes and all that's left is a bunch of vinyl, some microphones and a dollar store sampler.

Airs: 1st & 3rd Mondays 10pm - 12am The Eighties Hour is a rebroadcast of the music that complemented an age of disruptive technologies, new economies, right wing politics, and MTV. This soundtrack to the Beginning of the End Days is a mash up of New Wave, Post Punk, Synth Pop, and New Romantic sounds that pushed the boundaries of electronic music.

Idiot Business with DJ Blanketforts Airs: 2nd Mondays 10-11pm

The Isms Show with Betty Heredia

Radio Free Bridgeport with John Daley and Friends

Hardcore, Punk, + Talk!

The Eighties Hour with Reuben Kincaid & Simon From Across the Sea

catieolson.com spiderbug.org floorlengthandtux.com

What Day Is It? with Paul Nixon

Airs: Every Tuesday 4-6pm

A general (but not vague) conglomeration of schlazed out, new music from independent artists. Some jazz, too.

DJ Catieo spins a wide range of ecclectic and energetic tunes including psych rock, garage rock, soul, funk, disco and electronic tunes. DJ Catieo presents unexpected tunes and multiple musical genres to create a memorable soundscape for the listener.

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Airs: 4th Mondays 10pm-12am

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Planet Catieo with Catie Olson + Friends

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Airs: 1st & 3rd Mondays 6-8pm

Airs: Every Monday from 2-4pm

Airs: 1st & 3rd Mondays 4-6pm

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Idiot Business brings you experimentalelectronictechnnojunglerockhiphopcomedynoise and more. Lovingly curated by Mike Esposito (DJ Blanketforts), the show currently takes the form of a remote operation beamed to you from the sunny hills of LA... please enjoy!

Bel_Air Presents with Todd Carter Airs: Every Tuesday from 6-8PM Music from Chicago and beyond. A variety of studio and live musical tracks with the occasional special guest.

theradius.us

Out of Vogue with Alice McGorty, Ian Wise and guest DJs Airs: 1st & 3rd Mondays 6-8pm Bi-monthly broadcast radio show in Chicago focusing on punk rock including rare records, scene reports, news, interviews, and special interest pieces.

(((SONORAMA))) with Charly Garcia, Edgar Baca and Marlowe Baca Airs: Every Tuesday from 8-10PM Take a trip through Latin America's vinyl past circa 1950s and on. Get ready for hard hitting cumbias, eccentric pop, garage rock and tropical sounds with a few surprises here and there. sonoramachicago.com

facebook.com/outofvogueradio

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The Butter Hours with Scott Bufis and Eric Streichert Airs: First and Third Tuesdays from

Country, My Way with Lawrence Peters

10PM-Midnight Hi brow, lo brow, hi fi, lo fi, everything in between and love all ways in every direction.

Airs: 1st & 3rd Tuesdays 2-4pm Underplayed classics, and small-label gems, spanning all eras of honky tonk, bluegrass, outlaw, countrypolitan, western swing, country soul/funk. Stubbornly curated by Chicago’s country-est mofo: singer & songwriter Lawrence Peters. lawrencepeters.com

twotonecomix.com

The Bachelor Pad: Smoothest Grooves in the Galaxy with Tony The Luck of Lucien Medina & ¡Tropicalazo! Airs: 2nd & 4th Tuesdays 10pm-12am

Down and Outbound with Daniel Van Duerm Airs: 2nd & 4th Tuesdays 2-4pm Down and Outbound offers up experimental jazz and non-jazz music most of which comes from Chicago.

mixcloud.com/blanketforts

Step into the Bachelor Pad: The Smoothest Grooves in the Galaxy, on a journey through the Funky Skies as we Zig Zag around the globe to bring you the best in laid back Funky Beats pulled from every corner of the worldIndonesia, Hong Kong, India, Mexico, Colombia and even the good Ol' U-S of A

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W E D N E S D AY S Hometown Heros with DJ E2H2 Airs: Every Wednesday 2-4pm A musical journey through the deep crates of DJ E2H2 playing sweet smooth and soulful music.

Eclectic Ladyland with Joe Bryl Airs: Every Wednesday 4-5pm An aural exploration into the wide range of recorded music showcasing the best in new releases, re-issues and rare crate digging finds. Expect Rare Groove, Latin, Funk, Brazilian, Steppers, African, Acid Jazz & NeoSoul.

The Chicago Wrestling Rebellion with Nick Hausman & Ross Berman

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Eastern Transmissions with Robert Krums

Q.C. with King Hippo

Created exclusively from vinyl releases unearthed behind the iron curtain. Eastern Transmissions showcases a point in history where the quantity and quality of Western imports were limited, and Eastern Europe dug deep to create its own sound. robertkrums.com @robertkrums

Inbetween Radio/Stations with DJ Mykol & Glenn Russell Airs: 2nd & 4th Wednesdays 7-10pm Each show features, Music news, and interviews with guests who perform a live DJ set, and a mind bending experimental freestyle turntable jam from the Hosts. instagram.com/inbetweenradiostations facebook.com/InbetweenRadioStations-620378748099995/ @inbetweenradio

Night Time with Chris Hefner Airs: Every Wednesday 10pm-12am Short show Bio: Chris Hefner is a filmmaker, visual artist and musician in Chicago. Every week on his program he will play several of his favorite experimental and nocturnal records for you, at night. cmhefner.com

Airs: 1st Wednesdays 7-10pm Q.C. is for listeners who are interested in how soul, jazz, r&b, funk and hiphop are shaping new underground music from around the world. Listeners will also enjoy interviews, guest-mixes and in-studio performances by potent new artists. mixcloud.com/KingHippo

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Attention Deficit Radio with Sergio Rodriguez Jr.

Rush Hour Reggae with DJ RikShaw

Wattz Up! with Yollocalli Arts Reach Youth

Nuovo Arrivi with Edwin Menacho

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Chicago Inno Show with Will Flanagan, Jim Dallke and Karis Hustad

Airs: 3rd Wednesdays 8-10pm

Airs: Every Wednesday 5-7pm Fueled by the unwilling weirdness of Lumpen Radio, the Chicago Wrestling Rebellion is dedicated to getting inside your brain and filling it with suplexes, body-slams and submission holds.

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THE NEW AGE OF JAZZ with Hampton Airs: Wednesdays 2-4pm The New Age of Jazz superbly mixes classic cool with contemporary standards and futuristic stylings for a unique hybrid of America’s native music.

Symph Co. Presents Bedroom Beauties

Airs: 1st & 3rd Fridays 4-6pm

Airs: Every Saturday 12-1pm

Airs: 2nd Sundays 3-5pm

ADR brings you a multi-genre show that is constantly changing and bringing the grooves. Listen and you might find your new favorite artist.

RikShaw spins reggae rarities and classics. Mixed in a unique and entertaining style for your commute.

Wattz Up! is a youth produced and hosted talk show broadcast live from Studio Y in Little Village. Young people share their thoughts on the latest events, curious factoids and favorite jams sprinkled with some sass, wit and giggles.

An exploration of older and current music focused mostly on Ambient, House, and New Age instrumental tracks. Groovy and enlightened.

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S K E R D T O D A N C E with Bill Ocean + Jimmy Kaps

Airs: 1st & 3rd Thursdays 10pm- 12am

Skerd To Dance is a live dance radio show mixed by Bill Ocean + Jimmy Kaps that features guest DJ sets from friends and idols alike.

Tim Zawada and the Boogie Munsters crew spin vinyl selections highlighting the alternative funk scene during the era after disco but before house music... Boogie, Garage, Rare Groove, Modern Soul... with a strong focus on current new releases in the various electronic funk subgenres. The show highlights rare and overlooked vintage records alongside the contemporary labels and producers influenced by this era.

skerdtodance.com twitter.com/skerdtodance mixcloud.com/skerdtodance

The #Feelgoodmovement with DJ Greg #Feelgood Airs: 4th Thursdays from 6-8pm DJ Greg #Feelgood brings you two hours of #feelgoodmusic. Join us on the 4th Thursday of the month to hear Rap, Hip-Hop, R &B, and Soul classics & deep cuts. comefeelgood.com

Beer Temple Insiders Roundtable with Chris Quinn Airs: Every Thursday 8-10pm Owner of The Beer Temple, Chris Quinn, sits down with craft beer insiders to discuss the topics that matter most to them. Each week features different guests sharing their insights on different topics and giving you a insider's view of the evolving craft beer scene.

Airs: 2nd Thursdays 6-8pm Rudio digs deep into the roots of Latin American Psychedelia and follows its aesthetic, cultural, spiritual and political evolution into Post-Punk.

Our Internet Scientists' at Symph CO. have scowered the world wide web to find the best unknown and bedroom produced music.

Star Creature Radio with Tim Zawada & A Rotating cast of Boogie Munsters

Airs: 1st & 3rd Thursdays from 6-8pm

Ruido with Gabriel Feijoo

Airs: 3rd Wednesdays 7-8pm

Airs: Every Sunday 7-8pm

Airs: 1st & 3rd Thursdays 4-6pm

facebook.com/boogiemunsters soundcloud.com/timzawada starcreature.bandcamp.com

Future Past Music with DJ RikShaw & DJ LeDeuce Airs: 2nd Thursdays 10pm- 12am Short show Bio: These humanoid DJ’s combine their decades worth of mutant musical knowledge in order to broadcast a distress signal from the future featuring cold wave, dark wave, + new wave transmissions.

Stranger Days with Logan Bay Airs: Every 4th Thursday 10pm-12am Join Logan for a strange journey through all styles of music.

Que Hora Son Chi? with AfroQbano & Mos Airs: Second Fridays 4-6PM Que hora Son Chi? is a monthly broadcast exploring both vintage and modern afro-latin rooted sounds. QHS Chi also features a special guest program featuring prominent local musicians and DJs. www.afroqbano.com www.villapalooza.org

Weekend Wind Up with DJ Ham Sandwich Airs: Fourth Fridays 4-6pm Host: Mystery DJ Genre: Wouldn’t you like to know?

Hotness Mixtape Fantasy

yollocalli.org souncloud.com/yollocalli

Jams with Yollocalli Arts Reach Youth Airs: Every Saturday 1-2pm Yollocalli youth share their favorite jams in this milkshake playlist.From ska to jpop, tune in to hear a curated music hour direct from the Little Village neighborhood. yollocalli.org souncloud.com/yollocalli

The Don't Call Me Sweetheart! Show with Stephen Sonneveld and Andrew Gregory Krzak

Airs: Fridays 8-12pm

Airs: 2nd & 4th Saturdays 2-4pm

Every Friday features Superstar DJs from other planets. Press record.

Award-winning creators present equal parts satire, drama, humor and pathos via radio plays, interviews, field recordings and the occasional song. This is the sound of Pop Rocks spiraling down your ear canal and lodging in your brain, something dialed in halfway between an SOS signal from the Bermuda Triangle and a love poem written on the wind.

Que Hora Son Chi? with AfroQbano & Mos Airs: 2nd Fridays 4-6pm Que horas Son Chi? is a monthly broadcast exploring both vintage and modern afro-latin rooted sounds. QHS Chi also features a special guest program featuring prominent local musicians and DJs

Paid Time Off with Andrew Joseph and Laura Caringella Airs: 1st & 3rd Sundays 5-7pm DJs Laura and Andrew play the smooth, all-vinyl sounds of boogie, modern soul, and soft rock. The vibes are just right for relaxing, dancing, and romancing.

Ground Cover with Ed Bornstein & Special Guests

Labor Express Radio with Jerry Mead-Lucero Airs: Every Sunday 8-9pm Labor Express Radio is a weekly labor news and current affairs radio program. It is Chicago’s only English-language radio program devoted to issues related to the labor movement. News for working people by working people.

Magic Chats with Lyra Hill Airs: Every Sunday 9-10pm

Airs: 2nd Sundays 5-7pm Ground Cover is a vehicle for sonic juxtaposition and exists to find unknown links between artists. Covering sonic ground since 2013!

Magic Chats is an otherworldly interview show about cathartic listening, deep feelings, and spirituality. Each week, a different guest brings in some sounds that move them and we discuss how, why, when and where they find magic in their lives. lyrahill.com

mixcloud.com/groundcover

No Name with MTZ & Josh Fox Airs: 4th Sundays 5-7pm An all vinyl mix of music ranging from early electronic to soundtracks and secret gems.

hardtopronounce.com/radio

BeerDownload with Steve Mastny & Matt Arata Airs: Every Saturday 4-5pm BeerDownload is the only show that pits beers head to head in a tournament style competition to find out which beer reigns supreme. BeerDownload also features interviews and news from the beer industry. beerdownload.com

The Chicago Inno show covers the tech, startups, entrepreneurship, and research you need to know in Chicago.

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